I associate it with being jet lagged in London, though somehow in a wonderfully comforting way.Īgency by William Gibson will be published by Penguin later this month. “No More Yoga of the Night Club”, by Iain Sinclair, in his collection Slow Chocolate Autopsy. My mother had to teach me to read, as I wasn’t doing well at it in school. Entirely serious, but hypnotically entertaining. With its own intensely hierarchic organisation, the Victorian criminal underworld dizzyingly mirrored proper Victorian society in wonderfully revelatory ways. Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, that most steampunk of all works of British history (and if you know of better, let me know). Might this not be the way our descendants, such as they may be, experience literature? Moby-Dick, perhaps? Actually, I’m more embarrassed by starting to feel as though I have read it, but that only through following an account on Twitter that daily posts some brief and evocative snippet of it. When it’s funny, though, it’s much funnier than that. M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Until discovering Suttree, I’d not found the voice that could do that for me, Faulker having always felt instinctively too much like a part of the problem he was describing (if indeed he thought it a problem). A near future that chillingly predicted the foulest possible outcome of our past four years in the US.Ĭormac McCarthy’s Suttree, which admitted me, long into adulthood, to the adult culture and time of my childhood in the American south. The book is now a classic slice of US literary history that has sold over a million copies worldwide. Burroughs wrote his novel Naked Lunch from 1954 to 1956. Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence. A small hotel in the new part of town, where William S. One of them, certainly, though I’m still not quite sure how, was Naked Lunch, by William S Burroughs, which I read in secondhand hardcover when it was still quasi-illicit. The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs