Nova Express
Price: $300.00
Original Wrappers. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965. First Evergreen Black Cat Edition. Near Fine.
First Evergreen Black Cat Edition, sixth printing. Signed by Burroughs in black pen on title page. Publisher's white wrappers, with black and orange design to front wrapper, lettered in white, orange, and black. Near fine, with light spotting to spine, and light toning to page margins. Overall, a sturdy and clean copy. Nova Express is the third and final installment in Burrough's The Nova Trilogy, which also includes The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket that Exploded (1962). Together, the series represents Burroughs' follow-up to his 1959 The Naked Lunch. Interestingly, Nova Express is considered the best novel in the trilogy, winning more individual praise than its predecessors. In this text, Burroughs describes the perpetual battle between the "Nova mob," and "Nova police" that forms a "hallucinatory interplanetary cops-and-robbers game." Adding to its bizarre nature, Nova Express was written using Brion Gysin's cut-up method, in which authors slice up paragraphs of text and then combine unrelated words and phrases to create a new text. As Burroughs explains in his forward note, the cut-up method, which has its origins in Dadaism, had the consequential effect of rendering Nova Express "a composite of many writers living and dead." Item #WB046
