Cities of the Red Night

Cities of the Red Night

Cities of the Red Night
Hardcover edition by Viking Press
Author

William S. Burroughs

Coverartist

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death

Country

United States

Language

English

Series

Cities of the Red Night trilogy

Genre

Novel

Publisher

Viking Press

Publication date 1981

Mediatype

Print (Hardcover and Paperback)

ISBN

ISBN 0-312-27846-2 (US Paperback)

OCLC

46887518

Followedby

The Place of Dead Roads

[1]

Cities of the Red Night is a novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It is part of his final trilogy of novels,
known as The Red Night Trilogy, followed by The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, and was first
published in 1981. It was his first full-length novel since The Wild Boys a decade earlier. The plot revolves around a
group of radical pirates who seek the freedom to live under the articles set out by Captain James Mission. In near
present day, a parallel story follows a detective searching for a lost boy, abducted for use in a sexual ritual. The cities
of the title mimic and parody real places, and Burroughs makes references to the United States, Mexico, and
Morocco.

Plot introduction
The plot follows a nonlinear course through time and space. It imagines an alternate history in which Captain James
Mission's Libertatia lives on. His way of life is based on The Articles, a general freedom to live as one chooses,
without prejudice. The novel is narrated from two different standpoints; one set in the 18th century which follows a
group of pirate boys led by Noah Blake, who land in Panama to liberate it. The other is set in the late 20th century,
and follows a detective tracing the disappearance of an adolescent boy.

Cities of the Red Night

Development
In a March 15, 1966 letter to Brion Gysin, Burroughs describes a project he was working on at the time:
My latest literary project is a tour de force. About a Chinese officer in Tibet... a description of his
training in Academy 23... and what he finds in the monasteries would make a buzzard crack his
carrion... deliberately using places I have never been to.
This project would become the basis of the chapter "We See Tibet with the Binoculars of the People". The phrase
"we see Tibet with the binoculars of the people" first appeared in the essay "Ten Years and a Billion Dollars," in The
Adding Machine, amongst a group of random phrases selected from Konstantns Raudive's book Breakthrough.
Several of those phrases became chapter titles in Cities of the Red Night.

Art
The cover art for the 1981 Holt-Rinehart-Winston first edition is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's 1562 painting "The
Triumph of Death".

Footnotes
[1] http:/ / www. worldcat. org/ oclc/ 46887518

External links
Cities of the Red Night (http://sfreader.com/read_review.asp?t=Cities of the Red Night-William S.
Burroughs&book=839) review at SFReader.com, by James Michael White
Thomas M. Disch's review of the book from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/
specials/disch-burrows.html)

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors

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License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
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