The Nova trilogy, comprised of the novels The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967) and Nova Express (1964), constitutes American novelist William S. Burroughs' most extensive and radical experiment with narrative form. Like most of Burroughs' work during the Sixties, these novels were composed using the “cut-up” method in which existing texts, including Burroughs' own writings and/or writings by other authors, were physically cut into pieces of variable length and re-assembled in random order to generate unexpected juxtapositions and new syntactic relationships. Burroughs developed the cut-up method in collaboration with the Anglo-Canadian painter and novel

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Published 18 December 2002

Citation: Murphy, Timothy S.. "The Nova Trilogy". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 December 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10822, accessed 20 November 2009.]