Kathy Acker

A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

Blood and Guts in High School

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

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

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

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

Three Novels (Acker, Kathy)

Portrait of an Eye

Eurydice in the Underworld

Against Ordinary Language

Lisede Kan ve Cesaret

Slavoj Žižek

Jean Baudrillard

Judith Butler

Amresh Sinha

Lia Gangitano

David Rimamelli

Spectacular Optical

A collection of early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making. 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 cunt'... 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 Semiotext(e) 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...

Kathy Acker

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