Portrait of an Eye

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Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey exploring the boundaries of modern fiction that has since 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 of 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 a savage purity and raw energy matched only rarely in her later works.