Kathy Acker was a pioneering postmodern author whose works explored the boundaries of sexuality, identity, and power. Her writing is characterized by its experimental nature, blending genres and utilizing fragmentation and collage. Acker delved into the darker and often taboo aspects of human experience, challenging conventional narrative forms and reader expectations. Her provocative and uncompromising style makes her a unique and influential figure in literature.
The incredible variety of Acker's body of work has been distilled into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-20th century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life.
This collection features three early self-published novels by Kathy Acker, showcasing her pioneering voice in experimental literature. Accompanied by a new introduction from Kate Zambreno, the book highlights Acker's unique narrative style and thematic explorations. Readers can expect to delve into Acker's unconventional storytelling and bold exploration of identity, sexuality, and the boundaries of language.
Kathy Acker was a punk-rock counter-cultural icon, and innovator of the literary underground. The interviews collected here span her amazing, uncompromising, and often misunderstood 30-year career. From Acker's earliest interviews--filled with playful, evasive, and counter-intuitive responses--to the last interview before her death where she reflects on the state of American literature, these interviews capture the writer at her funny and surprising best. Another highlight includes Acker's 1997 interview with the Spice Girls on the forces of pop and feminism (which reads as if it could have been conducted with a new generation of pop star in 2018).
"After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace--by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-Files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching. Their correspondence is Plato's Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I'm Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time."--Page 4 of cover
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).
Kathy Acker's characteristically outrageous, lyrical, and hyperinventive novel concerns three characters who share an impulse toward self-immolation through doomed, obsessive romance. Teetering somewhere between the Beats and Punk, IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, literature of decadence and self-destruction.
Kathy Acker's Don Quixote features a determined woman on a bold quest to become a knight and combat modern America's evil enchanters by pursuing the audacious idea of love.
Demonology
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.
A literary collection of explicit writings--fiction, poetry, and essays--addresses "high risk" subject matter, such as illicit sex, incest, bondage, drug use, and transsexuality, and features contributions by progressive writers including Dorothy Allison, William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker. Reissue.
When Kathy goes to Haiti for a holiday she discovers that every man she meets wants to be her boyfriend. She dives into a sexual whirlpool in pursuit of love, craving more and more sex, for once is never enough.In what is perhaps her most accessible novel to date, Kathy Acker captures the most sensuous and secret aspects of female sexuality; that complete satisfaction is rare, so rare that once found it cannot be given up...Praise for Kathy Acker'Kathy Acker is in the great tradition of experimental American writers, Jack Kerouac out of Bill Burroughs, with a big musical influence.'Punch'Post modern fiction at its most incisive.'The Listener
