Moloko‘s new Burroughs study available now:
Oliver Harris/Farid Ghadami – Two Assassins: Hassan Sabbah/William Burroughs
From the blurb of this beautiful Moloko double edition:
“Two Assassins is a unique collaborative work, part detective story, part literary scholarship, part historical research, and part personal memoir that seeks to unravel a mystery: what the 11th-century Persian master of the Assassins, Hassan Sabbah, really meant for William Burroughs. Oliver Harris sheds light on the many untold backstories and dark textual secrets behind Burroughs’ invocations of Hassan Sabbah by retracing his own path of scholarship over the past 40 years. The result is a quest to discover the emotional as well as intellectual connections between the American writer and his most dedicated scholar. Farid Ghadami, on the other hand, tells the story of the real historical figure of Hassan Sabbah and his Ismaili successors, drawing on Persian and Arab sources to uncover some of the most important facts behind the legends.“