INTERZONE <i> by William S. Burroughs (Viking: $17.95; 194 pp.) </i>

Discovered in 1984 among Allen Ginsberg’s papers at Columbia University, “Interzone” is a collection of essays and notes that essentially constitutes a rough draft of William Burroughs’ masterwork, “The Naked Lunch.” The surrealistic novel has mystified many readers since it first appeared in 1959, with some praising it as “innovative” and “irreverent” and others denouncing its seemingly random violence as “sadistic” and “amoral.” Critics generally thought the novel portrayed the psyche of the heroin addict Burroughs was from ages 30-45. “Interzone,” however, suggests that “Naked Lunch” was most probably written, with sober calculation, as a way of rebelling against literary and social convention, which Burroughs called “the great monotony.” “Man needs play and danger,” Burroughs writes, paraphrasing Nietzsche, though “Civilization gives him only work and safety.”