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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

About a month ago I was in Berlin Every night I had a very strange dream I was watching an American chat show filmed in front of a live audience Except it wasn’t live, not exactly, but had the woozy shimmer of an old videocassette   After a storm of applause James Brown appeared and began to shriek and grunt just like he did when he was alive, like a kettle on fire Only these were not his usual yelps and squeals, those familiar words he tricked out into sound effects, ‘Baby! Please! Come on!’ They were names and areas taken straight from the fiction of William Burroughs Like an evil emcee he called out for the Subliminal Kid, the Mugwump Crew and everybody out there in Interzone There followed a blizzard of noise, sitcom whoops and shrieks of pleasure The Godfather of Soul, in my dream, was back from the dead I hadn’t read Burroughs for a long time but this dream became a brainworm, a loop that would never stop, a needle stuck in the same spot forever I had never exorcised him completely: Burroughs had been echoing around my head I had never felt the need to go back because he haunted me, appearing in films and on records, when I dreamed and when I woke and inside all the dislocated, hazy states I entered into at his word  I wanted to go back into the Interzone now, which still glowed in my memory like radioactive waste, to repel the ghost of my dream After hearing James Brown scream, I began to think of Burroughs’ work as a set of recordings, full of strange and fascinating sounds: a cacophony of gunshots, static, wolf howls, radio noise, joujoka pipes or, cutting randomly into Naked Lunch, ‘explosions of matter in cold interstellar space’ Somewhere, for an encore, James Brown listing them all like the symptoms that appear with nightmarish clarity on the bodies of Burroughs’ phantom junkies or, in his own slow and threatening drawl, describing toxic substances made by occult systems sinister beyond words Transcribing Burroughs’ ghostly

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Prize Entry

April 2017

Terre Haute

Lauren Van Schaik

Prize Entry

April 2017

We’ve been quarantined in the school gym for three weeks when we realise just how much we’ve forgotten. Not...

feature

September 2014

The Mediatisation of Contemporary Writing

Nick Thurston

feature

September 2014

Trying to figure out what marks contemporary literature as contemporary is a deceptively complicated job because the concept of...

poetry

Issue No. 8

Thank You For Your Email

Jack Underwood

poetry

Issue No. 8

Two years ago I was walking up a mountain path having been told of excellent views from the summit....

 

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