A brilliant and chilling collection of short stories that descends into the deeper recesses of the human mind and maps the bizarre and troubling byways of human history.

Dark, witty, and entertaining, The Skull of Charlotte Corday: And Other Stories returns insistently to the innermost dilemmas of femininity, spinning strange tales of medical humiliation, sexual betrayal, perverse eroticism, and the unsettling traumas of child rearing.

The title story, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday", tells the true tale of the beautiful assassin, who, during the Great Terror, murdered the French revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat in his bath. After her public execution, Corday's skull, a rich prize in the head-trading industry of the day, found its way into the hands of a descendant of Napoleon, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was to become a pioneer psychoanalyst. Leslie Dick skillfully interweaves the astonishing stories of these two women, their melodramatic lives linked by a macabre trophy.

From contemporary motherhood in Los Angeles to computer sex in Paris, these stories explore people, places, and emotions with an uncanny eye for detail and a sharp insight into the grand outrageousness of life.

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.