Then there is the gentle giant of American letters, . A heroin addict, accidental murderer, and occultist, Burroughs believed that language itself was a virus from outer space. His cut-up technique—scissors to a newspaper, rearranged at random—wasn't a gimmick. It was a magical ritual to exorcise control. His masterpiece, Naked Lunch , is less a novel than a splatter of fever dreams, talking assholes, and bureaucratic nightmare logic. Was he a genius? Undoubtedly. Was he a nut job? He shot a glass off his wife’s head and missed, killing her. He spent decades trying to communicate with a telepathic soul-fragment of a Mayan god. The answer is yes.

The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence.

Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe.

But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread.

By J. S. Latham

Nut Jobs Author -

Then there is the gentle giant of American letters, . A heroin addict, accidental murderer, and occultist, Burroughs believed that language itself was a virus from outer space. His cut-up technique—scissors to a newspaper, rearranged at random—wasn't a gimmick. It was a magical ritual to exorcise control. His masterpiece, Naked Lunch , is less a novel than a splatter of fever dreams, talking assholes, and bureaucratic nightmare logic. Was he a genius? Undoubtedly. Was he a nut job? He shot a glass off his wife’s head and missed, killing her. He spent decades trying to communicate with a telepathic soul-fragment of a Mayan god. The answer is yes.

The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence. nut jobs author

Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe. Then there is the gentle giant of American letters,

But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread. It was a magical ritual to exorcise control

By J. S. Latham