Download or read book Empire of the Senseless written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.
Download or read book Empire of the Senseless written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cyborg and her pirate lover travel through a violent Paris in this “apocalyptic tale that makes A Clockwork Orange look tame” (Publishers Weekly). Originally published in 1988, Empire of the Senseless marked a turning point in Acker’s wild, inimitable style. Considered one of her more accessible works, here Acker candidly addresses her lifelong obsessions: childhood and trauma, language and sexuality, criminality and corruption, oppression and rebellion. Abhor (part human, part robot) and her lover Thivai (a pirate) traverse Paris in a dystopian future, in search of a mysterious drug that Thivai needs in order to maintain his ability to love. Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes, while a band of Algerian revolutionaries take over, and the CIA plots to thwart them all. Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the desensitizing of cultural consciousness and the disintegration of interpersonal communication. A timeless, prescient parable, it speaks profoundly to our social and political history as well as our present reality. Praise for Empire of the Senseless “[A] complex, high-speed, intensely intellectual, intensely offensive, post-modernist, pained and painful, punk, fantastic, fictional construct and elaborate tattoo of a novel.” —New York Times “Empire of the Senseless is a family romance turned inside out, a twisted re-creation of quest sagas and Bildungsroman and TV sitcoms.” —Philadelphia Enquirer “A world of ugly truths, beautifully expressed. If you care to learn why Kathy Acker is such an important writer, I suggest you put aside your preconceptions, stop making sense, and read this book immediately.” —Alan Moore
Download or read book Don Quixote which was a Dream written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing the trauma of an abortion, a young woman mentally escapes by setting out on a series of adventures as Don Quixote.
Download or read book Great Expectations written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Empire of the Senseless gives the Dickens classic a punk twist, setting it in 1980s New York City. 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, Sylvère 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. Praise for Great Expectations “Great Expectations in its boisterousness and strong language and sense of the injustice-of-it-all is closely related to Henry Miller.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times “Acker’s most accomplished experimental work. . . . As she says in Great Expectations, “a narrative is an emotional moving.” It should be, but she’s one of the few people . . . who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.” —Sally O’Driscoll, Village Voice “[Acker’s] most completely unified work of art. . . . One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” —Alain Robbe-Grillet “A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.” —William S. Burroughs
Download or read book My Mother written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her 10th novel, Acker's heroine, Laurie, is a woman helpless before the fury of her emotions. Love-obsessed, Laurie is plunged into a harrowing dilemma--sexuality and her feminism are the two poles that threaten to obliterate her inner poise, the false magic of her woman's identity.
Download or read book Pussy King of the Pirates written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Empire of Sin written by Gary Krist and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author Gary Krist, a vibrant and immersive account of New Orleans’ other civil war, at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the battlegrounds of the Crescent City Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans’ thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city’s elite “better half” against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. Surrounding him are the stories of flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen, ruthless Mafiosi, venal politicians, and one extremely violent serial killer, all battling for primacy in a wild and wicked city unlike any other in the world.
Download or read book The Orwellian Empire written by Gilbert Mercier and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilbert Mercier's elegant book, "The Orwellian Empire, " has been well worth the wait. For years, Mercier has worked as a writer-journalist, well sought-out geopolitical analyst, and the founding editor-in-chief of "News Junkie Post" to bring his public the truth. Here he guides the reader in time and space, through his adopted home, the United States, turning over every stone in the unbalanced and crumbling world that this relatively young country has created around itself. From Afghanistan to Detroit, we are shown the ravages of the global corporate empire and its mechanisms, yet this is a hopeful book. Empires never last. The book's grounding in history, and its scholarly and impassioned observations, beckon the informed reader to dismantle the edifice, clear the rubble, and build a better world. Mercier's superb style make this generous offering of ideas riveting, from beginning to end. In time, "The Orwellian Empire" should figure among the books that endure and change readers.
Download or read book Woman on the Edge of Time written by Marge Piercy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1997-06-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Empire of Signs written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1982 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.
Download or read book Portrait of an Eye written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of three early, self-published novels by the author of Empire of the Senseless. Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey toward the boundaries of modern fiction that has made her one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation. From the start, Kathy Acker created a brash and sexy female voice as shocking as the worlds she invokes. In Childlike Life she steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer. In I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac she takes a man capable of deceiving both sexes as her lover in a dreamy odyssey through the labyrinth of her desires. In The Adult Life Toulouse Lautrec is a woman starved for love and sex. All of Acker’s obsessions “the frenzy of sexual desire, the search for identity, the invention of a new literary language” are present here with savage purity and raw energy. Includes: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec Praise for Kathy Acker and Portrait of an Eye “A countercultural hero who hybridized elements of punk, literary postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory in her public identity and in her literary works.” —New Republic “For Kathy, the breakthrough was her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula . . . she lifts lines from old biographies of murderesses. She adopts their picaresque style and switches out I for she. And suddenly, she’s off, and she can say anything.” —Chris Kraus, Paris Review
Download or read book Servant of the Empire written by Raymond E. Feist and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A sweeping drama unveiling a tale of love, hate and sacrifice against the panorama of an alien yet familiar society."--Publishers Weekly. "Uncommonly satisfying."--Locus
Download or read book Rip off Red Girl Detective and the Burning Bombing of America written by Kathy Acker and published by Acker, Kathy. This book was released on 2002 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently discovered and never before published, these two short novels were written in the early 1970s, at the beginning of Acker's writing career. Published together here, they reveal a young writer on a literary romp, imposing an original, sexy, and subversive world view that is unmistakably Acker.
Download or read book Tactical Readings written by Nicola Pitchford and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both writers' novels borrow heavily from other authors, and in doing so they offer strategies for a politically committed rereading of literary history and its interaction with the popular imagination.".
Download or read book Kathy Acker The Last Interview written by Kathy Acker and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathy Acker was a punk-rock counter-cultural icon, and innovator of the literary underground. The interviews collected here span her amazing, uncompromising, and often misunderstood 30-year career. From Acker's earliest interviews--filled with playful, evasive, and counter-intuitive responses--to the last interview before her death where she reflects on the state of American literature, these interviews capture the writer at her funny and surprising best. Another highlight includes Acker's 1997 interview with the Spice Girls on the forces of pop and feminism (which reads as if it could have been conducted with a new generation of pop star in 2018).
Download or read book Allegories of Violence written by Lidia Yuknavitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war.
Download or read book Narrative after Deconstruction written by Daniel Punday and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogating stories told about life after deconstruction, and discovering instead a kind of afterlife of deconstruction, Daniel Punday draws on a wide range of theorists to develop a rigorous theory of narrative as an alternative model for literary interpretation. Drawing on an observation made by Jean-François Lyotard, Punday argues that at the heart of narrative are concrete objects that can serve as "lynchpins" through which many different explanations and interpretations can come together. Narrative after Deconstruction traces the often grudging emergence of a post-deconstructive interest in narrative throughout contemporary literary theory by examining critics as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, and Edward Said. Experimental novelists like Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Kathy Acker likewise work through many of the same problems of constructing texts in the wake of deconstruction, and so provide a glimpse of this post-deconstructive narrative approach to writing and interpretation at its most accomplished and powerful.
