- The Yage Letters
infobox Book |
name = The Yage Letters
title_orig =
translator =
image_caption = First edition cover
author =William S. Burroughs andAllen Ginsberg
cover_artist =
country =United States
language = English
series =
genre =Correspondence ,autobiography ,drug culture
publisher =City Lights Books
release_date = 1963
media_type = Print (Hardcover andPaperback )
pages = 68 pp
isbn = NA
preceded_by =
followed_by = : "For the musical group by this name, seeThe Yage Letters (band) .""The Yage Letters", first published in
1963 , is a collection of correspondence and other writings byBeat Generation authorsWilliam S. Burroughs andAllen Ginsberg . It was issued byCity Lights Books .Most of the letters date back to
1953 and chronicle Burroughs' visit to theAmazon rainforest in search of yagé (ayahuasca ), a plant with near-mythical hallucinogenic and some saytelepathic qualities. Along the way, Burroughs and Ginsberg share other stories and anecdotes, including some concepts Burroughs would later use in novels such as "Naked Lunch ". The book ends with further correspondence written in1960 detailing Ginsberg's experiments with the yagé drug.Beyond the letters themselves, the book is noteworthy for two short pieces by Burroughs. The anarchic "Roosevelt After Inauguration", a savage parody of American politics in which "a purple-assed
baboon " is appointed to theUnited States Supreme Court , was omitted from the original edition of the book on the grounds it might be considered obscene; it was subsequently issued as a chapbook later in the 1960s and was later published in the small volume "Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities " with two political essays. The story was restored to "The Yage Letters" in a later reprinting by City Lights.The second notable piece serves as the epilogue to the book. "I Am Dying, Meester?" is considered a poem by some and is an early demonstration of the "
cut-up technique " espoused by Burroughs in the 1960s, shuffling together fragments of sentences and thoughts from other texts to create a surreal new narrative.Some sources, including City Lights Books itself, consider "The Yage Letters" to be a novel. According to the back cover of a 1990s edition of the book, Burroughs and Ginsberg began compiling the work in late
1953 , not long after the original set of letters was written, but it was not published for nearly a decade.The Yage Letters Redux
In April 2006, City Lights Books published "Yage Letters Redux", a new edition of the book edited by
Oliver Harris (who has previously edited other collections of correspondence by Burroughs). The book has been expanded with an extensive essay on its history (written by Harris), along with previously unpublished material by Burroughs and Ginsberg.
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