"Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer." —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times–bestselling authorA masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70t...

Talker is an interview zine about performance by Giles Bailey.Issue #5 is a transcript of an event hosted by the writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London in February 1987 in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work.A founding member of the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray gained fame for his autobiographical monologue performances. At the time of this conversation, he had just completed filming Jonathan Demme’s movie adaptation of his ...

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 VictorineKathy 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 terrifyin...

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, oppress...

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 femini...

The author of Empire of the Senseless gives the Dickens classic a punk twist, setting it in 1980s New York City.Kathy Acker's practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious—as a rebel and a groundbreaker—when Great Expectations was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens's classic—splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat's sexually violent Eden, Eden, Eden, among other texts—alongside A...

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 ...

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 hi...

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

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.

'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. Th...

'INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD'A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy AckerPenguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orw...