'Where are the snows of yesteryear. And the speedballs I useta know? Well, I guess it's time for my Ovaltine and a long good night.' In 1996 William Burroughs began writing a final journal. He died the following summer after a life of notoriety: godfather of the Beat writers, author of thirteen controversial novels, druggy, dangerous and bleak. Spanning the realms of personal memoir, cultural criticism and fiction, Burroughs' diaries include anecdotes and memories, entries on his beloved cats and the joys of housekeeping, and musings on drug-taking, humanity and government cover-ups. 'Last Words' contains some of the most brutally personal prose in the William Burroughs canon, and the deaths of his friends, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, provide a window onto his own preparations for death - a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, it became evident to professionals working within the meterological arena that the world's climate system was showing signs of change that could not be adequately explained in terms of natural variation. Since that time there has been an increasing recognition that the climate system is changing as a result of human industries and lifestyles, and that the outcomes may prove catastrophic to the world's escalating population. Compiled by an international team formed under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Climate: Into the 21st Century features an unrivalled collection of essays by the world's leading meteorological experts. These fully integrated contributions provide a perspective of the global climate system across the twentieth century, and describe some of the most arresting and extreme climatic events and their effects that have occurred during that time. In addition, the book traces the development of our capabilities to observe and monitor the climate system, and outlines our understanding of the predictability of climate on time-scales of months and longer. It concludes with a summary of the prospects for applying the twentieth century climate experience in order to benefit society in the twenty-first century. Lavishly illustrated in color, Climate is an accessible acccount of the challenges that climate poses at the start of the twenty-first century. Filled with fascinating facts and diagrams, it is written for a wide audience and will captivate the general reader interested in climate issues, and will be a valuable teaching resource. William Burroughs is a successful science author of books on climate, including Weather (Time Life, 2000), and Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2001), Does the Weather Really Matter? (1997) and The Climate Revealed (1999), all published by Cambridge University Press.

In 1970, William S. Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill began a small collaborative project on a comic entitled The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, which appeared in the first four issues of Cyclops, England s first comics magazine for an adult readership. Soon after, Burroughs and McNeill agreed to collaborate on a book-length meditation on time, power, and control, and corruption that evoked the Mayan codices and specifically, the Mayan god of death, Ah Pook. Ah Pook is Here was to include their character Mr. Hart, but stray from the conventional comics form to explore different juxtapositions of images and words.

Ah Pook was never finished in its intended form. In a 1979 prose collection that included only the words from the collaboration, Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts (Calder, 1979), Burroughs explains in the preface that they envisioned the work to be one that falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book nor that of a comix publication. Rather, the work was to include about a hundred pages of artwork with text (thirty in full-color) and about fifty pages of text alone. The book was conceived as a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative. It was conceived as 120 continuous pages that would fold out. Such a book was, at the time, unprecedented, and no publisher was willing to take a chance and publish a graphic novel.

However, Malcolm McNeill created nearly a hundred paintings, illustrations, and sketches for the book, and these, finally, are seeing the light of day in The Lost Art of Ah Pook. (Burroughs text will not be included.) McNeill himself is an exemplary craftsman and visionary painter whose images have languished for over 30 years, unseen. Even in a context divorced from the words, they represent a stunning precursor to the graphic novel form to come. Sara J. Van Ness contributes an historical essay chronicling the long history of Burroughs and McNeill s work together, including its incomplete publishing history with Rolling Stone s Straight Arrow Press, the excerpt that ran in Rush magazine, and the text that was published without pictures.

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon and J. G. Ballard, on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture.