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.

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.

A bestselling reference that makes welding easy for beginners and is handy for professionals. This guide's unique, comprehensive question-and-answer format allows readers to quickly find and fully understand what they are looking for. Expanded to include a new and heavily illustrated chapter on fabrication and repair tips.

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.

Essays by 13 authors, including Robert Mazzola, Carol Siegel, and Svetlana Mintcheva. Sections include "Writing between Madness and Paralysis," "Building the Body of Desires," "Attacking Language" and "Post-Plagiarism." With an introduction by the editor and a primary and secondary bibliography of Acker's work. .

From South Park to Kathy Acker, and from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City, women's sexual organs are demonized. Rees traces the fascinating evolution of this demonization, considering how calling the ‘c-word' obscene both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. Rees demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of the vagina's puzzlingly ‘covert visibility'. In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History examines the paradox of female genitalia through five fields of artistic expression: literature, film, TV, visual, and performance art. There is a peculiar paradox – unlike any other – regarding female genitalia. Rees focuses on this paradox of what is termed the ‘covert visibility' of the vagina and on its monstrous manifestations. That is, what happens when the female body refuses to be pathologized, eroticized, or rendered subordinate to the will or intention of another? Common, and often offensive, slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women's lived sexual experiences such that we don't ‘look' at the vagina itself – slang offers a convenient distraction to something so taboo. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate in understanding the feminine identity

Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and plagiarist, her oeuvreover a dozen novels and novellashas inspired a generation of writers and artists. Lust for Life is the definitive collection of essays on Acker's inimitable work, including Peter Wollen's elegiac primer, widely considered the best introduction to Acker, and Avital Ronell's erudite meditation on friendship and mourning. Together these essays by scholars and writers reveal Acker's profound and innovative project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.

The collected essays of the cofounder of the New Narrative movement, on theory, identity, poetry, and muses from Kathy Acker to Georges Bataille. I read and wrote to invoke what seemed impossible—relation itself—in order to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to “wake up” to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing. —from Communal Nude Since cofounding San Francisco's influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America's finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück's nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück's essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. “I'd laugh at (make art from) any version of self,” Glück writes, “I write about these forms—that are myself—to dispense with them, to demonstrate how they disintegrate before the world, the body.” For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing. Glück's essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, self-reflection, anecdote, escapade, and “metatext.” These texts span the author's career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O'Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück's essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice.

This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women’s writing, punk culture, and punk feminism’s reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women’s studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.

The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s "revolution of the word" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines through the work of more than fifty writers up to the present, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Georges Perec, Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair, Hélène Cixous, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five writing strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologising the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.