Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (Acker, Kathy) [Paperback]

Kathy Acker (Author), Amy Scholder (Author), Jeanette Winterson (Author), Dennis Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Series: Acker, Kathy | Publication Date: September 12, 2002

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

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Audacious innovator Acker (1948-97) titled one of her earliest novels Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and her last Pussy, King of the Pirates, and she did indeed raid the vaults of literature like a bisexual bandit in thrift-store drag and on speed, robbing the rich and established to give to the poor and marginalized.Keen-witted, outrageous, disaffected, and whip-smart, she sampled, riffed on, and subverted everything from Don Quixote to Great Expectations to pulp fiction to the life of Toulouse Lautrec, and laced her high-octane assaults on conventional family and social mores and cultural elitism with an explicitly female eroticism that challenges the male domination of porn and often veers into caustic humor and outright existentialism. Torrential yet finely composed, controversial and all too often misread, Acker's work had a profound, if underground, influence on late-twentieth-century literature, theater, and performance art. Essential Acker recognizes and highlights Acker's galvanizing fiction in a vital and tantalizing montage of excerpts from 19 of her rampaging novels, which Jeanette Winterson, no slouch herself, describes in her resounding introduction as "rigorous and playful, sexy and repelling, inventive and proverbial." Donna Seaman
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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (September 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802139213
• ISBN-13: 978-0802139214
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)