Kathy Acker - Free Library Land Online

Empire of the Senseless

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 10:30:57 +0200

A cyborg and her pirate lover travel through a violent Paris in this "apocalyptic tale that makes A Clockwork Orange look tame" (Publishers Weekly).
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 CIA plots to thwart them all.
Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the...

Kathy Acker

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:47:45 +0200

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).

Great Expectations

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:02:04 +0200

'New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world'Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations. Both familiar and unfamiliar, our orphaned narrator is transplanted to New York City in the 1980s; becoming, by turns, a sailor, a pirate, a rebel and an outlaw, through adventures incorporating desire, creativity, porn, sadism and art. This ribald explosion of literature, sex and violence shows the literary anarchist Kathy Acker at her most brilliant and brave. 'Acker's most accomplished experimental work' The Village Voice'A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill' William S. Burroughs

Literal Madness

Wed, 19 Aug 1987 09:30:50 +0400

A collection of three novels from the experimental feminist writer: "Literal Madness is Acker at her most powerful, disturbing, and provocative." —Catherine Texier, author of Victorine
Kathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, "speaks to us out of a delightful mock-naivete that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, [it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined" (Los Angeles Times).
My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bronté sisters—is a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford Courant).
In the haunting Florida, Acker achieves "a nearly telegraphic reduction of the Bogart-Bacall movie Key Largo to fatalistic,...

Portrait of an Eye

Sat, 25 Jan 1992 10:30:59 +0200

A collection of three early, self-published novels by the author of Empire of the Senseless.
Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey toward the boundaries of modern fiction that has 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 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 savage purity and raw...

Pussy, King of the Pirates

Mon, 11 Nov 1996 19:55:18 +0200

A retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a dizzyingly imaginative foray through world history, literature, and language itself.

Blood and Guts in High School

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:30:43 +0200

Janey undergoes, as if in a fairytale, a nightmare journey of exploitation - first incest, then abortions, a job selling cookies to the chi-chi bourgois of Brooklyn, a one-sided love affair with the leader of punk gang THE SCORPIONS, and finally is sold into the white slave trade in the middle east. Along the way she grapples with the cultural message of The Scarlet Letter, falls in love with Jean Genet, and angrily ridicules Erica Jong - the famous rich white face of 1970s feminism. Pulsating with the influence of William S. Burroughs, the narrative is a patchwork mish-mash of prose, poetry, drama, literary plagiarism and illustration - childlike sexual drawings pepper the book, along with Acker's surreal, minutely detailed, annotated 'dream maps'. Exploring feminism, punk, the idea of the "literary canon" and the United States of America, Blood and Guts in High School has lost none of its power to shock.