Dibs

Just as news reports are surfacing today about the tragic death last weekend of Anna Nicole Smith’s twenty-year-old son Daniel, a new (posthumous) book by the late son of another very famous figure is about to be published. Billed by its publisher, Soft Skull, as “a portrait of a wasted life,” Cursed From Birth is the sad story of a man born in 1947 to upper-class Beat honcho/heroin addict William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, whom the elder Burroughs would later kill with a shot to the head in a William Tell re-enactment gone wrong. Soft Skull sez: “Raised by his paternal grandparents in Palm Beach after his mother was killed by his father … Billy saw his father become suddenly famous for Naked Lunch just as he became a teenager. Billy Jr.’s short life was defined by creating trouble to catch the attention of his father, mourning the death of his mother, descending into alcoholism and drug addiction, and reckoning with it all by beginning his own literary endeavors.” He authored two books, Speed and Kentucky Ham, but was such a serious alcoholic that while visiting his father and Allen Ginsberg in Colorado in the late ‘70s, he began vomiting blood and was rushed to a hospital where he was lucky enough to receive a liver transplant — at that time, a rare surgery. But he kept drinking after the surgery, and died in 1981 of liver failure, his corpse discovered in a Florida ditch. Compiled by writer David Ohle (author of The Age of Sinatra and Pisstown Chaos, I kid you not) from Burroughs’ journals and poems and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, this new book has been in the works for many years.