After Kathy Acker
After Kathy Acker

Author: Chris Kraus

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0241318068

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Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon ... scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. The media storm that surrounded Kathy Acker's books was unprecedented: her books were banned in several countries and condemned by the mainstream media, but eventually the controversy, and attention, faded away. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible. In this first, fully authorized biography, Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer, and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.

Literal Madness
Literal Madness

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780802131560

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My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini imagines the Italian filmmaker and writer returning to the Roman homosexual hustlers he knew, in a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford Courant).

Pussy, King of the Pirates
Pussy, King of the Pirates

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0802146619

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A retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a dizzyingly imaginative foray through world history, literature, and language itself.

Great Expectations
Great Expectations

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 0802146589

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The author of Empire of the Senseless gives the Dickens classic a punk twist, setting it in 1980s New York City. Kathy Acker’s practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious—as a rebel and a groundbreaker—when Great Expectations was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens’s classic—splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat’s sexually violent Eden, Eden, Eden, among other texts—alongside Acker’s trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God. At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death. Praise for Great Expectations “Great Expectations in its boisterousness and strong language and sense of the injustice-of-it-all is closely related to Henry Miller.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times “Acker’s most accomplished experimental work. . . . As she says in Great Expectations, “a narrative is an emotional moving.” It should be, but she’s one of the few people . . . who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.” —Sally O’Driscoll, Village Voice “[Acker’s] most completely unified work of art. . . . One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” —Alain Robbe-Grillet “A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.” —William S. Burroughs

Empire of the Senseless
Empire of the Senseless

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780802131799

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Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Blood and Guts in High School
Blood and Guts in High School

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2018-02-09

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0802146554

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“Kathy Acker’s writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times–bestselling author A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before. In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” —until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening. “The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust “No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

Don Quixote, which was a Dream
Don Quixote, which was a Dream

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780802131928

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Facing the trauma of an abortion, a young woman mentally escapes by setting out on a series of adventures as Don Quixote.

Portrait of an Eye
Portrait of an Eye

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0802146651

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A collection of three early, self-published novels by the author of Empire of the Senseless. Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey toward the boundaries of modern fiction that has made her one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation. From the start, Kathy Acker created a brash and sexy female voice as shocking as the worlds she invokes. In Childlike Life she steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer. In I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac she takes a man capable of deceiving both sexes as her lover in a dreamy odyssey through the labyrinth of her desires. In The Adult Life Toulouse Lautrec is a woman starved for love and sex. All of Acker’s obsessions “the frenzy of sexual desire, the search for identity, the invention of a new literary language” are present here with savage purity and raw energy. Includes: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec Praise for Kathy Acker and Portrait of an Eye “A countercultural hero who hybridized elements of punk, literary postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory in her public identity and in her literary works.” —New Republic “For Kathy, the breakthrough was her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula . . . she lifts lines from old biographies of murderesses. She adopts their picaresque style and switches out I for she. And suddenly, she’s off, and she can say anything.” —Chris Kraus, Paris Review

Lust For Life
Lust For Life

Author: Amy Scholder

Publisher: Verso

Published: 2006-05-17

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9781844670666

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Kathy Acker was one of the original, subversive & influential writers of the late 20th century. This is a collection of essays on Acker's work, including Peter Wollen's primer, & Avital Ronell's meditation on friendship & mourning. It reveals his project, & the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political & cultural life.

My Mother
My Mother

Author: Kathy Acker

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780802134035

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In her 10th novel, Acker's heroine, Laurie, is a woman helpless before the fury of her emotions. Love-obsessed, Laurie is plunged into a harrowing dilemma--sexuality and her feminism are the two poles that threaten to obliterate her inner poise, the false magic of her woman's identity.