I don’t think we have a leak, but of course, we’d be the last to know. Certainly Hailey blurting everything out to the whole company was ill-advised if we do – I think she needs a spanking for that, and she’ll pay more attention if it comes from you than she will if it comes from me. I might be her boss, but you’re The Boss
Aside from that, I’m really not sure how we’d go about finding a leaker – I assume we’d have to hire someone from outside the company, but I don’t know who. I wish I did, but I’ve just never had this situation come up before. One thing I know: we’ll need whoever it is to have a light step. People round here are likely to be touchy if their loyalty is impugned – after all, these are exactly the guys who sided with me against Hargraeves in the first place.
Naked Lunch – no The – was first published in Paris in 1959. (US publication would wait until three years later.) It was a breakthrough novel for William S. Burroughs, who had spent five years writing it, mostly in Tangier, and mostly under the influence of a variety of drugs, or withdrawal from the same. As a text, it is a challenging work, with Burroughs’ hallucinatory prose further made confusing by the application of the Cut Up Method. Classifying it into a genre is nigh impossible, although it could be argued that the work prefigures both magic realism and gonzo journalism.
The book was not well received in the US upon its publication. In Burroughs’ own words:
When I started writing Naked Lunch, people offered their opinions: “Disgusting,” they said. “Pornographic, un-American trash!” “Unpublishable.” Well, it came out in 1959, and it found an audience: town meetings, book burnings and an inquiry by the state Supreme Court. That book made quite a little impression…
