Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs
Inexplicably, William S. Burroughs has not been embraced by the LGBTQI community as one of our own, even though his queerness was central to his life and work. Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs serves as an appreciation and reclamation project. We seek to bring Burroughs into the gay literary canon. Editors Brian Alessandro, co-author of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story graphic novel, and Tom Cardamone, author of the Lambda Award-winning speculative fiction novel Green Thumb, have compiled interviews and essays featuring emerging and established writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and critics, including Blondie founders and musicians Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, cultural critic and author Fran Lebowitz, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Tony Kushner (Angels in America), filmmaker David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch), multiple Hugo-Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany (The Mad Man, Nova, Babel-17), National Book Award-winner Edmund White, PUNK magazine founder and former SPIN and NERVE editor, Legs McNeil, Gregory Woods (A History of Gay Literature), Paul Russell (The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov), Charlie Vazquez (Dreaming Out Loud: Voices of Undocumented Writers), Rebel Satori publisher Sven Davisson and Burroughs’s bibliographer and literary executor, James Grauerholz, among many others. Some offer critical assessments of Burroughs, while others share personal experiences.
Brian Alessandro is a writer, artist, and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Newsday, Interview Magazine, Bloom, PANK, Huffington Post, Turtle Point Press, Lambda Literary, Edmund White: By the Book, and (Re): An Ideas Journal. He has also written and directed the feature film, Afghan Hound, founded the literary journal, The New Engagement, and wrote the novel, The Unmentionable Mann. He recently co-adapted Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. He holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has taught the subject for twelve years.
Tom Cardamone is the editor of Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book, and is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning speculative novella Green Thumb as well as the erotic fantasy The Lurid Sea and other works of fiction, including two short story collections. Additionally, he has edited The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.
Praise for Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs
Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone’s exhilarating Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs takes the already refractory genius of William S. Burroughs and strains it through the prism of dozens of other geniuses, thereby restoring to us one of the most necessary writers of the 20th Century. Transgressive, startling, surreal, and queer as hell, Alessandro and Cardamone’s book is itself fully worthy of its subject. —Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
I confess that I’d rather read about Burroughs than read him. This aristocratic scarecrow in seedy suits is far more interesting to me than his experimental fantasies. But Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone have put together a lively collection of different voices and points of view that gave me a wonderful place to think about Burroughs, both the man and his work. I learned a lot and came away with new appreciation for him and his place in culture, popular, unpopular, queer and otherwise. —Christopher Bram, author of Gods & Monsters
Fever Spores is a cornucopia, a total feast: for the Burroughs student, fan, newcomer too: enjoy and be satisfied by this queer writer like none other. Bravo to Alessandro & Cardamone! —Kathe Koja, author of Cipher, Under the Poppy and Dark Factory
Any queer who’s had a formative moment with Burroughs will find this book both illuminating and refreshing. These excellent interviews and essays place this master in his proper spot within the canon: right up front with the best of them. —Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
Fever Spores is a beautiful retro futuristic, timely, prophetic, mindful read that travels outside any kind of inspired oral history. —Jonathan Caouette, director of Tarnation
