Cities of the Red Night

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Title Cities of the Red Night

Hardcover edition by Viking Press.
Author William S. Burroughs
Country United States
Language English
Series Cities of the Red Night trilogy
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Viking Press
Released 1981
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-312-27846-2 (US Paperback)
Followed by The Place of Dead Roads

Cities of the Red Night is a novel by beat author William S. Burroughs that was first published in 1981 (his first new full-length novel since The Wild Boys a decade earlier). It is the first in a trilogy and is followed by The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. The plot of this somewhat disjunctive work revolves around a group of revolutionary homosexual drug addicts who seek the freedom to live as they will, while a supernatural disease spreads across the world. The events described occur across vast expanses of time and space, without obvious temporal or spatial connections.

The cover art for the 1981 Holt-Rinehart-Winston first edition is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's 1562 painting "The Triumph of Death".