"The most significant person to Burroughs’s Mexican experience was undoubtedly his troubled wife."
“You won’t make a mistake visiting Mexico … everything I have seen so far has been much to my liking,” wrote William S. Burroughs to Jack Kerouac in 1949. Burroughs had just fled south of the border with his wife Joan and their two young children to avoid standing trial on drug charges in Louisiana. Still years away from publishing the books that would establish him as a major voice of the post-World War II avant-garde, Burroughs delighted in the freedoms of his new home. Mexico City, a place where “anyone who feels like it carries a gun … needles and syringes can be bought anywhere … [and] people simply don’t care what anyone else does,” suited his criminal tendencies and caginess alike.
Allotment Stories: Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien.
Saving Animals: Elan Abrell and Kathryn (Katie) Gillespie on sanctuary, care, ethics.
Making creative laborers for a precarious economy: Josef Nguyen, Carly Kocurek, and Patrick LeMieux.
Browse our Fall/Winter 2022-23 catalog for exciting forthcoming books!
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