Essential Acker The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker

by Acker, Kathy; Scholder, Amy; Cooper, Dennis; Winterson, Jeanette

• ISBN13: 9780802139214
• ISBN10: 0802139213
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-12
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigor and creative fire that made her one of America's preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted -- the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire -- and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future. "Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know." -- Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review

Table of Contents

Introduction
Editor's Note
from "Politics" (1968)	p. 1
from The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S. (1972)	p. 4
from Rip-off Red, Girl Detective (1973)	p. 10
from The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973)	p. 23
from I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac (1974)	p. 42
from The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975)	p. 55
Florida (1976)	p. 71
from Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978)	p. 83
from Blood and Guts in High School (1978)	p. 100
"New York City in 1979" (1981)	p. 131
"Hello, I'm Erica Jong" (1982)	p. 148
from Great Expectations (1982)	p. 150
Implosion (1983)	p. 159
from "Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl" (1983)	p. 175
from "Algeria" (1984)	p. 180
from My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984)	p. 185
from Don Quixote (1986)	p. 203
from "Lust" (1988)	p. 230
from Empire of the Senseless (1988)	p. 249
from In Memoriam to Identity (1990)	p. 271
from "Low" (1990)	p. 302
from My Mother: Demonology (1993)	p. 308
from Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996)	p. 319
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.