Essential Acker: The Selected Writings

by Kathy Acker, Amy Scholder, Jeanette Winterson

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.

Genres: Fiction, Feminism, Literature, Queer

352 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2002

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

nothing like 335 pages of cunt

[Mel]

This was excerpts from various selections of Kathy Acker's writing. Some of it was tedious as hell, but a lot of it was very good. It is definitely not for the easily offended or people put off by any kind of sex. There is some kind of fucking, masturbation and/or sex reference, gay and straight on every single page. She thinks about it and talks about it a lot. She isn't shy about it. It is NOT implied. Parts of it were surreal and almost as if you were having a sex fantasy and recorded your rambling thoughts that were running through your mind. Some of the stories mention rape and incest This is NOT an easy read. That being said, it was enjoyable and interesting. It is experimental writing so not all of it worked enough to give it 5 stars but I liked it enough to put it in my best reads pile. I will be seeking out the longer versions of some of the writing.

[Maya]

as much as I feel she has influenced me greatly, I don’t particularly enjoy reading her writing. what’s that about??

[Joel]

Acker doesn't work in novels. She works in chopped-up versions of her lengthier works. This compendium is living proof that Acker's outtakes from her novels work in shorter form.

[Anna]

I certainly have respect and appreciation for Acker's project to create nonlinear narratives and disrupt the forms of traditional literature, with her iterations of Don Quixote, Great Expectations and Hansel and Gretel, for example. Reading this book felt like a new world was being opened up to me; there are many significant, strange moments, and I'm definitely curious to check out the fuller volumes of the texts collected here.

[Daniel Schulof]

The style from the earliest selections was really working well for me. Not just fragmentation, but a kind of disregard for the rules of grammar while retaining meaning. Just like the mind works. Very cool. But I grew bored with the material from the middle -- it became repetitive and uninteresting. Also, the persistent focus on sexual/transgressive subject matter became a problem for me because it didn't ring true to my own internal experiences of these phenomena, particularly in the persistent self-referentiality and in the coexistence of close physical detail and intense romanticism. Perhaps shocking only for its own sake.

[Rachel Sarah]

Like every good Feminist / poststructuralist I measure Acker against Smut and there's nothing like pages and pages of C U N T to extinguish the categories

[Darren]

felt like the best way acker could be read. given she can be so surreal no matter what she's writing, the genre pivots become less obvious when ur just excerpting them (i didn trealize empire of the senseless as sci-fi until i looked it up)...but my mother: demonology and low had really well chosen paragraphs thatd make me wanna read them more

[Marina Sofia]

Works very well as a book to read on and off, rather than working your way systematically through it. Some of the extracts were perhaps not too well chosen to show her variety. She is still provocative and angry as anything!

[Emma Killeen]

Definitely interesting, but seemed redundant after a while. I haven’t read her individual books yet so maybe her writing isn’t necessarily like that- but maybe it was the curation of her work that created this experience

[Holly Stephen]

Lot of cunt innit

[Miguel Oliveira]

Had to pause, a bit repetitive and boring, some fun bits though!

[ali]

This was my first exposure to Acker’s works and i’m not normally a “selections” person but this made me want to go in and read these novels. and they stood alone as selections really well.

[Yiannis]

3 stars only based on the selection of excerpts. Other than that, Saint Kathy forever.

[For Books' Sake]

Essential Acker is a comprehensive introduction to this influential and transgressive author for those who haven’t encountered her before, and a handy compilation for the already-converted fanatics.

The anthology effectively showcases the appropriation techniques Acker was so renowned for; inspired by the cut-up writings of William Burroughs, she plundered classics such as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes as well as pop culture, current affairs and religious texts for plot and characters.

Sex, power, paranoia, desire and disgust are recurring themes, focusing on visceral bodily responses; sex scenes are described in terms of muscles, nerves, hair and liquid. Similarly, there’s an emphasis on textures such as leather and fur and the sensual responses that they evoke.

(Excerpt from full review of Essential Acker at For Books' Sake)

[Alika]

Whatever you might think about Kathy Acker, she did write some crazy kick-ass stuff. When you need a bolt of energy to get you out of a reading rut, flip to any of Kathy's pages to give you a sharp kick in the pants.

[amin ghazaei]

بزودی یک ویژه نامه در باره کتی آکر در اینترنت منتشر خواهم نمود.

[Tessa]

Contains excerpts from most of her books. A good introduction to Acker. I think the editors could have chosen better selections from some of the books, but overall it's good.

[Cat]

This book changed my life.

[Dan]

Acquired 2005
Gift from Jenn

[Jon Boulier]

Laudable experimentally and for the progression of literature; aesthetically, not my cup of tea. But: Respect.