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 ...

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...

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...

'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...

Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novelsAt Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where t...

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and SpirosAntonapoulos, deaf-mutes who have lived together for several years. Antonapoulos becomes mentally ill, misbehaves, and despite attempts at intervention from Singer, is eventually put into an insane asylum away from town. Now alone, Singer moves into a new room. In the absence of his friend, how will Singer cope in a new surrounding? Excerpt: "In the town there were two mute...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel**, which established** him as one of the great American writers of his timeDavid, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's...

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Vivid . . . engagingly lucid and disarmingly funny' GUARDIAN'Beautifully done . . . witty and poignant' THE TIMES'Brilliant' OBSERVER**Welcome to Mike Engleby's world. Deep in the hallowed halls of an esteemed English university, Mike is one of the only working-class boys, amongst the privileged masses. He's also different, starkly so, but able to observe it all. But observation soon tips into obsession when his fixation, fellow s...

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024****WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION 2024**‘Beautiful…brings to life an entire world’ SALLY ROONEY‘Sublime… A thrillingly moreish novel’ SUNDAY TIMESIt’s the biggest weekend of the year and everything is about to change…In Ballina, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer Cillian English and County Mayo’s enforcers, Gabe and Sketch ...

'An Aztec West Wing' GUARDIAN'I was so impressed that I'm on my second read' TORREY PETERS'A triumph' FINANCIAL TIMES'Glorious' i-DA NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE TRANSLATED FICTION OF 2024In 1519, Conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops ride into the floating city of Tenoxtitlan – today’s Mex...