The Adding Machine

"Sheer pleasure. . . . Wonderfully entertaining."--Chicago Sun-Times Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous "cut-up" method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

Adding machine: a musical / 5m, 4f, 3 musicians / various scenes -- tells the story of Mr. Zero, an unlikely anti-hero for the working man. Rewarded with a pink slip after 25 years in the same office. Zero kills his boss, gets executed, and winds up in the Elysian Fields, where he is given a last chance at love with Daisy Devore, his long-suffering secretary.

This constantly interesting play shows, in outline, the life history and, in its later scenes, the death history of Mr. Zero, a cog in the vast machine of modern business -- from cover.

THE STORY: Tells of a delightful young woman who quite inefficiently runs a bookstore. She is one of those charming but dreamy, over-imaginative young women whom the slightest suggestion may send off into the most extravagant daydreams. In her own

Presents mathematical shortcut and "how to develop a calculator in your head."