Oliver Harris – författare

A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonising powers of planet earth that have turned us all into machines.Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of The Soft Machine's writing and rewriting, demolishing the myths of Burroughs' chance-based writing methods and demonstrating for a new generation the significance of his greatest experiment.

The most ferociously political and prophetic book of the Cut-Up Trilogy, Nova Express fires the reader into a textual outer space to show us our burning planet and to reveal the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness. As with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, William Burroughs deploys his cut-up methods to make a visionary demand that we take back the world that has been stolen from us. Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition reveals how Nova Express was cut from an extraordinary wealth of typescripts to create startling new forms of poetic possibility.The third book of Burroughs' linguistically prophetic 'cut-up' trilogy - following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - Nova Express is a hilarious and Swiftian parody of bureaucracy and the frailty of the human animal.

'Oliver Harris is always pure quality and I'm loving the hell out of his foray into the contemporary spy novel' Ian Rankin'Scary if true, or even half true' Sunday Times star pickThere is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane - mercurial, inquisitive, free floating. He's spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers, deniable and deeply effective. Kane is a ghost in his own life, picking up and dropping personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when a woman he loves, Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced centre stage. Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. He's used to a new mode of hybrid psychological warfare - but snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges. Poised between China, Russia and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it's impossible to work out who is manipulating who. And Kane's not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.Unable to trust anyone, hunted by his own colleagues, and with the life of someone he loves at stake, Kane needs to work out who is driving events, and why...Readers say:'Damn, Harris knows what he is talking about, and damn if he doesn't stream that knowledge hard and fast through a sniper's ricocheting trickshot of a plot' five star reader review'I love the geopolitical skullduggery, the contemporary Great Game ... and it does feel contemporary. It puts espionage solidly in the digital world without losing the essence - people on the ground' five star reader review'Up there with LeCarre in my view. I'll get everything he's written now' five star reader review

Ascension: the most remote island in the world . . .Elliot Kane, former spy, trying to leave the world of espionage behind. Kathryn Taylor: a stalled career in MI6, running the South Atlantic desk. Rory Bannatyne: covert technical specialist. Dead, apparently of suicide. Three friends from a mission many years ago reconnect when one of them dies on Ascension Island. Rory Bannatyne had been tasked with tapping a new transatlantic data cable, but a day before he was due to return home he is found hanged. When Kathryn Taylor begs Kane to go over and investigate, he can't say no, but it's an uneasy reintroduction to the intelligence game. Ascension is a curious legacy of England's imperial past. Only employees and their families are allowed to live there. It's home to several highly-classified government projects, a British and American military base, and forty dead volcanic cones. Entirely isolated from the world, the disappearance of a young girl at the same time as Rory's death means local tensions are high. Elliot needs to discover what happened to her as well as to Rory. But the island contains more secrets than even the government knows, and it's not going to give them up without a fight.

'A twisting spiral of lies and corruption' Val McDermidFrom the hilltop he could see London, stretched towards the hills of Kent and Surrey. The sky was beginning to pale at the edges. The city itself looked numb as a rough sleeper; Camden and then the West End, the Square Mile. His watch was missing. He searched his pockets, found a bloodstained serviette and a promotional leaflet for a spiritual retreat, but no keys, phone or police badge.Detective Nick Belsey needs help.Something happened last night - something with the boss's wife - and Belsey needs to get out of London, and away from the debt and the drink and the deceit.Collecting his belongings back at Hampstead CID on what should be the last day of his career, Belsey sees a missing person's report. But this one's different; this is on The Bishop's Avenue, one of the most expensive streets in the city. Belsey sees a chance for a new life.But someone else got there first.Praise for A Hollow Man'[Belsey has] got to be London's coolest cop... Harris has plundered London's underworld for his richly plotted and unusual detective series... It's heady stuff' Daily Mail'Thrills, spills and fine writing' Telegraph

'Makes the capital as eerie as Le Carré's Berlin' Evening StandardMonday 10 June, end of a hot day. The city had started drinking at lunchtime and by 3 or 4pm crime seemed the only appropriate response to the beauty of the afternoon...At quarter to five he felt his contribution to law and order had been made. He parked off the high street, sunk two shots of pure grain vodka into iced Nicaraguan espresso and put his seat back. In an hour he'd be off duty, and in a couple more he'd be on a date with an art student he'd recently arrested for drugs possession. London is steaming under a summer of filthy heat and sudden storms - and Detective Nick Belsey, of Hampstead CID, is trying to stay out of trouble. But then somebody sets him a riddle. How does a man walk into a dead-end alley and never come out? And then reappear - to snatch a girl, to dump a body beneath a London skyscraper, to send Belsey a package of human hair. The answer lies underground, where the secrets degenerating beneath the city's sickly glitter are about to see the light of day.Praise for Deep Shelter'Relentless...explosive' Mail on Sunday'The coolest cop you'll have come across in ages. London through his eyes is as atmospheric as a drawing by Gustave Doré... This demands to be read before the television adaptation' Kate Saunders

'Mazy, pacy London noir' Ian RankinTen days after the station closed, he was informed he'd been officially suspended pending a hearing over allegations of gross misconduct. No details. A few hours after that, he got a call from a man who wouldn't give his name but told him he was under surveillance...They were bracing themselves for a shit-storm. Stay safe, the caller said, and hung up.Amber Knight is hot property - pop star, film star, front-page gossip.DC Nick Belsey is less celebrated. He can't shake his habit of getting into serious trouble and his career at Hampstead CID is coming to a dishonourable end. He is currently of no fixed address - squatting in a disused police station round the corner from Amber's swanky Primrose Hill mansion. But a knock on the door from a frantic and confused woman looking for her missing son is about to lead Belsey straight into the heart of Amber's glittering life. When a body is found and a twisted crime spree ensues, Belsey finds himself dangerously embroiled in a world of celebrity, obsession, glamour and desperation.Praise for The House of Fame'Harris has a terrific sense of place, hurtling between the wealthiest and most-run-down areas of London... The plot unfolds in a chilling and totally unexpected direction' Sunday Times 'A fast-paced thriller that is also nuanced and evocative...hats off to Harris, who has, once again, managed it with style and authority' Guardian'Gripping, and Oliver Harris is punchy and perceptive' The Times

'Oliver Harris is an outstanding writer... he combines violence and romance, a sense of place and humour, in the same exciting way as, for example, Michael Connelly' The Times 'An intelligent, brilliantly plotted and paced thriller...If you need to feed your Mick Herron habit, Oliver Harris could be just the fix' Irish Times 'One of our finest thriller writers' Evening Standard'Oliver Harris is always pure quality' Ian RankinNick Belsey's on the run. Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and surely that's enough to start afresh. But it's not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions.DI Kirsty Craik had also hoped she'd left Nick Belsey behind her, in the wilder days of her career. When a five am call instructs her to track him down or she'll be dead by Christmas, it seems he's walked back into her life with characteristic commotion. Craik is forced to break the rules once more to find out what her former lover is up to.She needs to save herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey too.Readers say'I've just read the whole series in 10 days..and just couldn't stop' five star reader review'The narrative pace refuses to blink and Belsey is never short of being the very best of company' five star reader review'I so enjoy this author's novels and have read all the backlist. This book did not disappoint. It is a fast-moving crime thriller featuring the irrepressible Nick Belsey and tough police detective Kirsty Craik' five star reader review

'Here's a novel to make the great and the good quake.... Harris writes with compassion or satirical glee, depending on which his characters deserve, and this third Kane novel puts him firmly in the Mick Herron class' Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph'Captivating and horrifying... Oliver Harris is squarely in the territory of the greats: Greene and le Carré but also the modern masters, Mick Herron and Adam Brookes. There can be no higher accolade' Manda ScottHow does a secret service confront its past, when its secrets must never be revealed?Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business leaders and the service's own personnel.There are seven decades' worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. They are the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online, panic spreads through the Establishment like wildfire. At first, the security breach only manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a disappearance, a breakdown. But when it's discovered that the individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has been leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency before the entire political and business systems are fatally weakened. That's when they call for Elliot Kane...

Celebrating and analyzing a landmark novel that is aberrant, obscene, and blasphemous, ""Naked Lunch"" was banned, ridiculed, and castigated on publication in 1959, and yet fifty years down the line it has lost nothing of its power to astonish and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, and a landmark experiment in linguistic derangement, it is a work of ecstatic, excoriating laughter and great, transcendent beauty. The first book ever to take on William Burroughs' masterpiece, this critical collection brings together an international array of writers, scholars, musicians, scientists, and artists who cast new eyes on the writing and reception of Burroughs' unique work. Tracing its origins from Texas to Tangier, from Mexico City to New York and Paris, crossing time zones and cultures, ""Naked Lunch @ 50"" breaks new ground in understanding this most influential but elusive of texts. ""Naked Lunch @ 50"" includes studies of the text's manuscript and textual history, of its origins in and creative debts to a range of specific locations, of its reception in different societies over time and in relation to broader cultural, artistic, and personal histories. Contributors discuss the novel's existence as a physical object in regard to both design and collectability, the history of its critical reception, its cultural importance in relation to censorship and visionary art, its relationship to literary genres - from science fiction to the horror film - and its significance as a work prophetic of current trends in electronic culture and biology. A series of introductory sections, or 'Dossiers', written by Ian MacFadyen, provide glimpses of further horizons of research and reading, while a set of endpapers by the artist Philip Taaffe offers a visual correlative to Burroughs' extraordinary text.

In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes to record trademark vignettes of political and psychic malaise. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that appeared ten years later as “In Search of Yage” within The Yage Letters.That book, published by City Lights in 1963, was completed by the addition of Ginsberg’s account of his own experiences with yage as he traveled through South America in 1960, and by the addition of other Burroughs letters and texts.For this new edition, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts to untangle the history of the text, telling the fascinating story of its genesis and cultural importance in his wide-ranging introduction. Also included in this edition are extensive materials, never before published, by both Burroughs and Ginsberg that shed new light on their adventures in exploration and writing“A complete understanding of the literary legacy of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg is impossible without reading this amazing collection of letters and documents centered on yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. . . . These crucial texts go beyond simple curiosity about mind-changing drugs to set the foundation of what would later become a literary movement that changed American literature.”—Bloomsbury Review"Burroughs' book about his search for the 'ultimate fix', The Yage Letters, possesses an equally strange and secret history. Published in 1963 but written a decade earlier, it has long been seen as a fascinating curio in the Burroughs canon, yet a new edition of the book, edited by Oliver Harris, places it more centrally in the list of key Burroughs texts. . . . The Yage Letters marks the point when Burroughs moved full-time into his own, fully realised universe."—The Independent UKWilliam Burroughs is widely recognized as one of the most influential and innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Naked Lunch, Queer, The Wild Boys and The Place of Dead Roads.Oliver Harris is a professor in literature and film in the School of American Studies at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of William S, Burroughs (Penguin) and the 50th anniversary edition of Junky (Penguin).

William Burroughs in Context offers the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the iconic author to date and it captures the immense scope of Burroughs' radical vision and cultural influence. Moving far beyond the Beat Generation, this volume brings together 35 original essays that reframe Burroughs through his many identities: novelist, multimedia artist, queer visionary, drug theorist, and cultural provocateur. By organizing contributions around themes like space-time travel, technology, environmentalism, and creative collaboration, the book presents Burroughs as a uniquely situated figure at the crossroads of literature, science, philosophy, and pop culture. The contributors-drawn from leading voices in literary studies, media theory, cultural history, and the arts-offer readers fresh insights into both familiar and underexplored dimensions of Burroughs' oeuvre. An essential resource for scholars and fans alike, this landmark volume positions Burroughs as a central figure in understanding 20th-century counterculture and its ongoing 21st-century legacy

Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan’s work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.Harris begins by considering the role of Plato and Socrates in Lacan’s conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline’s scientific aspirations, and Lacan’s embrace of its expressive potential. The final chapters explore Lacan’s defence of tragedy and his return to Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon, and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that Freud places at the heart of infantile development.Lacan’s Return to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in understanding Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field, being of particular value to those interested in the roots of Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on enduring controversies, from Lacan’s pronouncements on feminine sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.

Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan’s work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.Harris begins by considering the role of Plato and Socrates in Lacan’s conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline’s scientific aspirations, and Lacan’s embrace of its expressive potential. The final chapters explore Lacan’s defence of tragedy and his return to Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon, and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that Freud places at the heart of infantile development.Lacan’s Return to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in understanding Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field, being of particular value to those interested in the roots of Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on enduring controversies, from Lacan’s pronouncements on feminine sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.

'Oliver Harris's Ascension is a stunner. What a pleasure it is to read a book with a powerful story, an unusual and fully realised setting, a convincing hero, all written in a style of luminous clarity' Philip PullmanAscension: the most remote island in the world . . .Elliot Kane, former spy, trying to leave the world of espionage behind. Kathryn Taylor: a stalled career in MI6, running the South Atlantic desk. Rory Bannatyne: covert technical specialist. Dead, apparently of suicide. Three friends from a mission many years ago reconnect when one of them dies on Ascension Island. Rory Bannatyne had been tasked with tapping a new transatlantic data cable, but a day before he was due to return home he is found hanged. When Kathryn Taylor begs Kane to go over and investigate, he can't say no, but it's an uneasy reintroduction to the intelligence game. Ascension is a curious legacy of England's imperial past. Only employees and their families are allowed to live there. It's home to several highly-classified government projects, a British and American military base, and forty dead volcanic cones. Entirely isolated from the world, the disappearance of a young girl at the same time as Rory's death means local tensions are high. Elliot needs to discover what happened to her as well as to Rory. But the island contains more secrets than even the government knows, and it's not going to give them up without a fight.

185A brilliant, blistering crime novel, A Season in Exile moves seamlessly between Mexico and London culminating in a nail-biting finale...Praise for Oliver Harris:'One of our finest thriller writers' Evening Standard'Oliver Harris is always pure quality' Ian RankinNick Belsey's on the run.Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and surely that's enough to start afresh. But it's not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions. DI Kirsty Craik had also hoped she'd left Nick Belsey behind her, in the wilder days of her career. When a five am call instructs her to track him down or she'll be dead by Christmas, it seems he's walked back into her life with characteristic commotion. Craik is forced to break the rules once more to find out what her former lover is up to.She needs to save herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey too

'Here's a novel to make the great and the good quake.... Harris writes with compassion or satirical glee, depending on which his characters deserve, and this third Kane novel puts him firmly in the Mick Herron class' Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph'Captivating and horrifying... Oliver Harris is squarely in the territory of the greats: Greene and le Carré but also the modern masters, Mick Herron and Adam Brookes. There can be no higher accolade' Manda ScottHow does a secret service confront its past, when secrets are kept for ever?Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business leaders and the service's own personnel.There are seven decades' worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. These amount to the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online, the panic is widespread.At first, the security breach only manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a disappearance, a breakdown. But when it turns out that the individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has somehow leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency. That's when they call for Elliot Kane...

When power depends on war, the most dangerous thing is peace.Midwinter in Pyongyang, Kane walks the streets alone. A frozen city in a frozen war, it's a strange place to call home: silent but for the loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda, with a population that watches his every move. By Christmas he's the only one left in what passes for the British embassy, two offices tucked away in the former East German HQ, along with a Swedish delegation and some NGOs. Under diplomatic cover, he's been tasked with the lightest of espionage: building ties, establishing potential lines of communication, turning a blind eye to the hacking farms, meth labs, and heroin production that feed the gangster-state beneath the Stalinist shell.It's his most challenging posting yet, so challenging you have to give up everything you know about spying and just walk and sniff the wind. But there's an attraction to being removed from the rest of the world, hiding in the eye of the storm, with its tiny expat community, its guards at the city's edges, its children of the elite and strange distortion of a university. And, working within that university, a woman Kane is falling in love with, even if both know that any hint of romance threatens their lives. Sensations are sharpened in the shadow of the regime. Moments of joy are vivid.This dystopian idyll is interrupted when Kane's only friend in the city, a Swedish charity worker, is brutally murdered. Kane needs to investigate for his own sake. If they can be targeted anyone can. But why were they? And how does it connect to a strange request the man made during their last encounter, one that leads Kane back to the woman at the university?

When power depends on war, the most dangerous thing is peace.Midwinter in Pyongyang, Kane walks the streets alone. A frozen city in a frozen war, it's a strange place to call home: silent but for the loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda, with a population that watches his every move. By Christmas he's the only one left in what passes for the British embassy, two offices tucked away in the former East German HQ, along with a Swedish delegation and some NGOs. Under diplomatic cover, he's been tasked with the lightest of espionage: building ties, establishing potential lines of communication, turning a blind eye to the hacking farms, meth labs, and heroin production that feed the gangster-state beneath the Stalinist shell.It's his most challenging posting yet, so challenging you have to give up everything you know about spying and just walk and sniff the wind. But there's an attraction to being removed from the rest of the world, hiding in the eye of the storm, with its tiny expat community, its guards at the city's edges, its children of the elite and strange distortion of a university. And, working within that university, a woman Kane is falling in love with, even if both know that any hint of romance threatens their lives. Sensations are sharpened in the shadow of the regime. Moments of joy are vivid.This dystopian idyll is interrupted when Kane's only friend in the city, a Swedish charity worker, is brutally murdered. Kane needs to investigate for his own sake. If they can be targeted anyone can. But why were they? And how does it connect to a strange request the man made during their last encounter, one that leads Kane back to the woman at the university?