Burroughs across Borders

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Burroughs across Borders Hassan Melehy (bio) The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico Jorge García-Robles Daniel C. Schecter, trans. University of Minnesota Press www.upress.umn.edu 156 Pages; Print, $17.95 One of William S. Burroughs’s distinctions is to figure among the most controversial of US authors, for both his life and his work, the former often invoked to indict the latter. The publication of Jorge García-Robles’s wonderful little book may go a long way toward smoothing out the controversy, for the very significant reason that it joins current efforts to view the Beat Generation as a transnational phenomenon. A novelist, himself, who is the leading Mexican specialist on the Beat Generation and a translator of Jack Kerouac, García-Robles offers a vivacious narrative that situates Burroughs’s exile years in Mexico, 1949–1952, in the currents of the country’s modernism and social life that ran in the shadow of the formidable political and cultural presence to the north. I

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