Future Mythologies

With the ridiculously stupid furor over Frey's book A Million Little Pieces spilling over the media, it seems timely that I just recently read Burroughs' Junky for the first time. I haven't read Frey, but Junk was such a great read that the question of authenticity in the work didn't enter my mind until a week after I had finished it. But if you've read any of Burroughs' corpus you probably know that the author's responsibility toward the reader to represent reality, honesty, and truth are three entirely different things.

Junk is Burroughs first book, and is half a world apart from Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy. The sci-fi elements are almost completely absent, and the dystopian paranoia is much more subtle. It works as a great introduction, as you can see how lucid he can be when he wants to, and every once in a while he delves into the surreal workshop and begins to forge the materials of his (and our) literary future.