A beatnik tourist in ayahuasca country

The Yage Letters, by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, City Lights, 68 pages, $8–$54 used Long before it was popular for New Age norteamericanos to visit the Andes Mountains seeking psychedelic enlightenment from ayahuasca, the Beat novelist William Burroughs made the trek. But he took the journey in 1953, when the literary template for a psychonautic vision quest had not yet been set—not that a grumpy cynic like Burroughs was likely to write that way in the first place. Instead his account feels like the diary of an easily aggravated...