Top 15 Must See African Destinations The Yage Letters. The Yage is an early epistolary novel by William S. Burroughs, chronicling his journey to the Amazon jungle in search of the telepathic hallucinogenic mind expanding drug Yage (Ayahuasca). The letters exchanged between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a young poet in New York, were pruned and edited to form this book, containing the first seeds of later Burroughsian fantasy in Naked Lunch. The volume also includes Ginsberg's account of his own experiences with the drug in Peru and a final poetic cut up by Burroughs.