Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon ... scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. The media storm that surrounded Kathy Acker's books was unprecedented: her books were banned in several countries and condemned by the mainstream media, but eventually the controversy, and attention, faded away. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible. In this first, fully authorized biography, Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer, and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.

“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 author A 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 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before. In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” —until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening. “The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust “No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

Kathy Acker is widely considered one of the most important writers of the late 20th century. While her novels have become cult classics, establishing her influence on postmodernists, feminists, performers, punks and students of literature, her essays are available only in this comprehensive collection. Bodies of Work maps a wide-ranging cultural territory. From art and cinema, through politics, bodybuilding, science fiction and the city, they reflect and challenge the times in which we live. Matching guts with theory, anger with compassion, Acker offers original views on such subjects as diverse as the films of Peter Greenaway, the paintings of Goya, the writings of Marquis de Sade and copyright in the age of the internet. Collectively, these essays offer the reader a journey into provocation and delight.

My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini imagines the Italian filmmaker and writer returning to the Roman homosexual hustlers he knew, in a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford Courant).

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 Acker’s trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God. At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death. Praise for Great Expectations “Great Expectations in its boisterousness and strong language and sense of the injustice-of-it-all is closely related to Henry Miller.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times “Acker’s most accomplished experimental work. . . . As she says in Great Expectations, “a narrative is an emotional moving.” It should be, but she’s one of the few people . . . who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.” —Sally O’Driscoll, Village Voice “[Acker’s] most completely unified work of art. . . . One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” —Alain Robbe-Grillet “A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.” —William S. Burroughs

“It’s shocking to learn that this is McBride’s first book...Eat Your Mind does everything a good biography should and more” —Los Angeles Times The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature. Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Senses; and Pussy, King of Pirates, Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution. She was notorious for her methods—collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critique—as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits, she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today. Acker’s life was as unruly and radical as her writing. Raised in a privileged but oppressive Upper East Side Jewish family, she turned her back on that world as soon as she could, seeking a life of romantic and intellectual adventure that led her to, and through, many of the most thrilling avant-garde and countercultural moments in America: the births of conceptual art and experimental music; the poetry wars of the 60s and 70s; the mainstreaming of hardcore porn; No Wave cinema and New Narrative writing; Riot grrrls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. As this definitive, “sympathetic, studious” (Edmund White, winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters) biography shows, Acker was not just a singular writer, she was also a titanic cultural force who tied together disparate movements in literature, art, music, theatre, and film. A feat of literary biography, Eat Your Mind draws on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker’s intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work, acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride, offers a thrilling account and a long-overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist.

LC copy inscribed by the author on first preliminary page: "for Burt, all my love Tooloose Lautrec."

The incredible variety of Acker's body of work has been distilled into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-20th 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.

'Acker has a remarkable ear for the technical excess and emotional death of modernity. She smashes the codes and attends to the heart' - Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman

The first authorized biography of postmodernism's literary hero, Kathy Acker. Acker's life was a fable; and to describe the confusion and love and conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the late twentieth century. It is girls from which stories begin, she wrote in her last notebook. And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through means both within and beyond her control. —from After Kathy Acker Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon… scholar, stripper, victim, and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible. In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises. Beginning in her mid-teens, Acker lived her ideal of the Great Writer as Cultural Hero, and as Kraus argues, she may well have been the only female writer to succeed in assuming this role. She died of untreated cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana when she was fifty years old, but the real pathos of Acker's life may have been in the fact that by then she'd already outlived her ideal.