Kathy Acker

Demonology

My Mother

This writing is all fake (copied from other writing) So you should just go away and not read any of it' A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy Acker.

New York City in 1979

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.

Empire of the Senseless

McKenzie Wark

Matias Viegener

John Kinsella

"Why am I telling you all this? Partly 'cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child's play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be." [M.W.] "It's two in the morning... I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn't for play I'd be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable... " [KA] -- from I'm Very into You 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 corresepondence is a 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.

Correspondence 1995--1996

I'm Very Into You

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.

Great Expectations

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.

In Memoriam to Identity

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

Don Quixote, which was a Dream

An erotic and dreamlike reinterpretation of "Treasure Island" is told from a female perspective, featuring a crew of women on a wild adventure from an Alexandrian whorehouse to Pirate Island

Pussy, King of the Pirates

Originally published in 1988, Empire of the Senseless marked a turning point in Acker’s wild, inimitable style. Considered one of her more accessible works, here Acker candidly addresses her lifelong obsessions: childhood and trauma, language and sexuality, criminality and corruption, oppression and rebellion. Abhor (part human, part robot) and her lover Thivai (a pirate) traverse Paris in a dystopian future, in search of a mysterious drug that Thivai needs in order to maintain his ability to love. Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes, while a band of Algerian revolutionaries take over, and the C. I. A. plots to thwart them all. Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the desensitizing of cultural consciousness and the disintegration of interpersonal communication. A timeless, prescient parable, it speaks profoundly to our social and political history as well as our present reality.

A dead man tries to solve the mystery of his murder, a woman discovers sexual obsession on a holiday trip, and a gangster terrorizes hotel guests

Three Novels

Literal Madness

Kathy Acker's essays cover a range of subjects, from body-building, through politics and science fiction, to the work of contemporary artists and philosophers. They offer insight into broader issues and figures, including Richard Prince, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, the Marquis de Sade, Peter Greenaway and Hannah Arendt.

Essays

Bodies of Work

Science fiction-roman om to unge på en desperat rejse fra New Yorks slumkvarter til Algeriet og Paris, hvor de møder et afsindigt kaos af vold, sex og narko

Against Ordinary Language

Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through an experimental and avant-garde tradition, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems, and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. As a postmodernist, plagiarist, and post-punk feminist, she continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers, and artists. The book GET RID OF MEANING, edited by Anja Casser and Matias Viegener, is the first comprehensive publication on Acker?s work from an artistic and literary perspective. It includes previously unpublished material from Acker?s personal archive and other collections. 0The publication is the compilation of a multipart research project including an exhibition and a symposium at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.00Text: Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, Anja Casser, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick, Claire Finch, Johnny Golding, Anja Kirschner, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer, Douglas A. Martin, Jason McBride, Karolin Meunier and Kerstin Stakemeier, Avital Ronell, Daniel Schulz, Matias Viegener, McKenzie Wark.00Exhibition: Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany (05.10. - 02.12.2018).

Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

Nayland Blake

Good and Evil in the Work of Nayland Blake

Kathy Acker's Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on a formidable quest: to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America by pursuing "the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love." In this visionary world, Don Quixote journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love. Presiding overt this late-twentieth-century Levithian is Thomas Hobbes--the Angel of Death. -- Back cover.

"From the book 'Pussy, king of the pirates' by Kathy Acker"--Title page verso.

Pussycat Fever

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

Kathy Acker

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