Kathy Acker Books In Order

Great Expectations

Using postmodern form, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations moves her narrator through time, gender, and identity as it examines our era s cherished beliefs about life and art.

Blood and Guts in High School

Jamey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a who*re. Otherwise there was nothing. Once day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life, starting with ‘Parents stink’ Her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her. With ‘Blood and Guts in High School, ‘ Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everthing from post punk po*rn to post punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.

Don Quixote

In this extraordinary and unique novel, Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on an intractable quest to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America.

Literal Madness

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.

Empire of the Senseless

Acker continues her post modern explorations with a story set in a bleak world where the society we know is dying in its own ruins.

In Memoriam to Identity

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good for nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she’s having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self destruction.

My Mother

Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology is the powerful story of a woman’s struggle with the contradictory impulses for love and solitude. At the dawn of her adult life, Laure becomes involved in a passionate and all consuming love affair with her companion, B. But this ultimately leaves her dissatisfied, as she acknowledges her need to establish an identity independent of her relationship with him. Yearning to better understand herself, Laure embarks on a journey of self discovery, an odyssey that takes her into the territory of her past, into memories and fantasies of childhood, into wildness and witchcraft, into a world where the power of dreams can transcend the legacies of the past and confront the dilemmas of the present. With a poet’s attention to the power of language and a keen sense of the dislocation that can occur when the narrative encompas*ses violence and po*rnography, as well as the traumas of childhood memory, Kathy Acker here takes another major step toward establishing her vision of a new literary aesthetic.

Pussycat Fever

‘If one day, a bad girl named Dante met a mean dy*ke called Hieronymous Bosch, this is the book they’d make.’ Jenny Livingstone, director, Paris Burning.’Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other’ The New York Times Book ReviewKathy Acker holds a unique place among American novelists, as a writer who constantly pushes at the frontiers of modern fiction, with each new work advancing further into uncharted territory. Pussycat Fever is a hallucinatory amalgam of emotion and desire. Join Pussycat and the anonymous narrator on a journey filled with sex and dangerous liaisons. Coming of age was never like this! Kathy’s words are complemented by the artwork of Diane DiMassa best known for her long running comic book series Hothead Paisan and the intriguing collages of famed artist Freddie Baer.

Eurydice in the Underworld

This is an anthology of short fiction and other writings by Acker, including ‘Politics’, her debut work written at the age of 21, and ‘The Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl’, plus ‘The Birth of a Poet’, a play in three acts. It also features an interview with Acker.

Artspace Is / Artspace Was

An irreverent document of Artspace’s 15 year commitment to exhibitions, publications, performances, videos and film, this book challenges the notion of what an organization for and about artists can be at the dawn of the 21st century. Supported by Artspace grants, the guerilla artists of Survival Research Laboratories terrorized San Fransisco with robots and air cannons, Karen Finley astonished audiences at Theater Artaud, and Jenny Holzer sucker punched unsuspecting Giants fans with big board LED messages at Candlestick Park. Here are projects by such provocateurs as General Idea, Jessica Diamond, David Mach, and Patrick Ireland, stills from videos by Tony Oursler and Sophie Calle, and the legendary ‘Lunch Movies’ of emeritus museum director Jim Elliot, featuring Candy Darling. From ‘Shift’ magazine come articles by Ingird Sischy and Kathy Acker; images from the newly released Chris Munch film ‘Sleepy Time Gal’; and excerpts from Artspace Books, an artist writer series featuring works by John DeFazio, Dave Hickey, David Wojnarowicz, Jack Pierson, Jim Lewis, Nan Goldin, Klaus Kertess, Gregory Crewdson, Rick Moody and A.M. Homes. ‘Artspace Is/Artspace Was’ is an engaging presentation of artists who know to combine subversion and fun in their work.

Rip-Off Red

Recently discovered and never before published, these two short novels were written in the early 1970s, at the beginning of Kathy Acker’s writing career. Rip off Red reads as a kind of Raymond Chandler for bad girls, as Acker’s typical literary playfulness transforms the genre conventions of detective fiction into a book that is simultaneously a mystery and a personal, raunchy, and politically astute account of life in New York City. The Burning Bombing of America is a dystopian vision of the destruction of America, combining crypto Socialist class critique with the visceral surreality of the Book of Revelation. Published together here, they reveal a young writer on a literary romp, imposing an original, sexy, and subversive worldview that is unmistakably Acker. They are a perfect introduction to Acker’s oeuvre and essential for all Acker readers. ‘Kathy Acker’s trancelike writing style peels away the layers of reality.’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘America’s most beloved transgressive novelist.’ Spin ‘Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.’ William S. Burroughs

Hannibal Lecter, My Father

You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn’t worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: ‘Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don’t eat cu*nt’…
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket sized collection of some early and not so early work by the mistress of gut level fiction making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker’s raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self published ‘zines written under the nom de plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker’s opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self deprecating conversation with Semiotexte editor Sylvere Lotringer which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker’s fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany’s Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker’s work was judged to be ‘not only youth threatening but also dangerous to adults,’ and subsequently banned. Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She’s definitely not for the easily offended but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about…

Portrait of an Eye

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula; I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac; The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec

Bodies of Work

Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other. The New York Times Kathy Acker is widely considered one of the important writers of the late twentieth century, yet her essays are available only in this comprehensive collection. Bodies of Work maps a wide ranging cultural territory. From art and cinema, through politics, bodybuilding, science fiction, and the city, they reflect and challenge the times in which we live.

Essential Acker

Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigor and creative fire that made her one of America’s preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker’s body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late twentieth 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. Her vision questions everything we take for granted the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker’s ’70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future. ‘Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know.’ Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review