Word: boils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin's characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator is also fond of the short set piece. Here is a Cadillac that has been sitting in the heat too long: "Whatever was plastic in the car . . . had begun to bubble, boil, the glue melting and the car's great load of padding rising yeastlike, separating, creating seams he'd been unaware of before, like the perforations on Saltines...
Collecting in pools at the base of the car, the liquid appeared to "boil" and mixed with moisture in the air to form the gaseous cloud...
Naked Lunch exploded like a lanced boil on the American literary scene in 1959. The novel, a farrago of discontinuous fragments, takes the reader on a graphic tour of the hellish interstices of a junkie's mind, the fantasies of castration and necrophilia and technology gone amok. The updated Gothicism, hip drugginess and black humor of Naked Lunch established Burroughs' audience, composed mostly of young people. Norman Mailer compared reading Burroughs to "being in a room where three radios, two television sets, stereo hi-fi, a pornographic movie, and two automatic dishwashers are working at once." John Clellon Holmes called...