After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography Contributor(s): Kraus, Chris (Author) |
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ISBN: 1635900565 ISBN-13: 9781635900569 Publisher: Semiotext(e) OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: August 2018 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures |
Dewey: B |
Series: Semiotext(e) / Active Agents |
Physical Information: 1.2" H x 6.4" W x 9.1" (1.19 lbs) 352 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. 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. 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Kraus, Chris: - Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles. |