Loosely related to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a grrrl pirate story that journeys from the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria though an unidentified, crumbling city that may or may not be sometime in the future, to Brighton Town, England, and, finally, to a ship headed toward Pirate Island, where the stories converge and the vision ends. Neil Gaiman, a close friend of Acker's, has written a new introduction to this anniversary edition. In typical Acker fashion, he's including a text exchange with one of Acker's fictional heroines, Janey Smith, along with stories of their friendship and what Acker would think of everything now, today, "as the world begins to burn."

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

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.

'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 Acker Penguin 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 Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know. -New York Times Book Review The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker's debut and the first in this three-novel collection, began as an episodic handmade pamphlet that Acker mailed out to influential writers and artists whose addresses she managed to get her hands on. In the novel, Acker steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer, and mixes in fragments from porn, historical romance, pulp fictions, and The Story of O. Collect with her second novel, the dreamy exploration of desire I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac, and her third, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Portrait of an Eye is dive into the frenzy of sexual wanting, the search for identity, and the invention of a new literary language. Now with an introduction by Kate Zambreno contextualizing the resurrection of these three early Acker novels, this new edition of Portrait of an Eye reminds us of all there is still to learn from Kathy Acker, a writer and artist whose work remains radical and uncanny, entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature (Guardian).

Kathy Acker's Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on a formidable quest: to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America by pursuing "the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love." In this visionary world, Don Quixote journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love. Presiding over this late-twentieth-century Leviathan is Thomas Hobbes-the Angel of Death.

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 the destruction of America, combining crypto-Socialist class critique with the visceral surreality of the Book of Revelation. Published together here, they reveal a young writer on a literary romp, imposing an original, sexy, and subversive worldview that is unmistakably Acker. They are a perfect introduction to Acker's oeuvre and essential for all Acker readers. Kathy Acker's trancelike writing style peels away the layers of reality. -- San Francisco Chronicle America's most beloved transgressive novelist. -- Spin Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill. -- William S. Burroughs

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs '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 This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon. Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

Kathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, "Speaks to us out of a delightful mock-na'vete that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, [it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined" (Los Angeles Times). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini - wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bronte sisters - is a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford Courant) In the haunting Florida, Acker achieves "a nearly telegraphic reduction of the Bogart-Bacall movie Key Largo to fatalistic, tough-guy essentials." (Booklist)

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, Sylvere 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.

The tempestuous email correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, shimmering with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. "Why am I telling you all this? Partly 'cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child's play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be." [M.W.] "It's two in the morning... I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn't for play I'd be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable... " [KA] -from I'm Very into You After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace-by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching. Their corresepondence is a Plato's Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I'm Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time.

This is an anthology of short fiction and other writings by Acker, including Politics, her debut work written at the age of 21, and The Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl, plus The Birth of a Poet, a play in three acts. It also features an interview with Acker.

A collection of early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making. You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'... Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer-which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be "not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults," and subsequently banned. Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended-but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...

'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. This ribald explosion of literature, sex and violence shows the literary anarchist Kathy Acker at her most brilliant and brave. 'Acker's most accomplished experimental work' The Village Voice 'A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill' William S. Burroughs

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.