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“... After Modernism , a collection of essays published in 1984 by the New Museum in downtown New York, Kathy Acker wrote: ‘The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which ...”

“... Kathy Acker wrote 13 novels and published one collection of essays before her death from cancer, aged 53, in 1997. Born in New York, she began writing when she returned there in the early 1970s after studying at Brandeis and the University of California, San Diego, a brief marriage, and spells working as a stripper, a bakery clerk and in several other eccentric jobs ...”

“... shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy Acker’, by evoking the circles that gathered around her subject’s ashes in the weeks after her death from metastatic breast cancer in an alternative medicine clinic in Tijuana in November 1997. Seventeen people arrived at the house of the poet Bob ...”

“... in hand, against an Italianate blue sky. Laing had been reviewing Chris Kraus’s biography of Kathy Acker for the Guardian; she had been holidaying in Val d’Orcia with her newish husband, Ian Patterson, the Cambridge academic and poet who was Jenny Diski’s husband until her death in April 2016; she was tweeting about Sam Shepard and Brexit and ...”

“... and sadness for life’s shortness. The voices can be divided. The experiences of, for example, Kathy Acker or Michael Ignatieff are very different from those of the men and women who arrived in Britain from Africa and Asia. Of these, some had a start in their new lives, some had none. By and large, the blacker and poorer they were, the worse time they ...”

“... Kathy Acker, wild and woolly avatar of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives and parables, oppose the imposed narrative structure, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional – or even modernist – literature ...”

“... as they go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone ...”

“... no other and goes in for the uncomfortable and shocking – has a piece by the American writer Kathy Acker which is entitled ‘Don Quixote’. This is part of a forthcoming novel. For Acker, Don Quixote is a woman, and the novel begins, in the Fred, with these words: When she was finally crazy because she was ...”

“... contrast with Something Leather. Part of the impetus for that novel came from a suggestion made by Kathy Acker, who asked Gray if he had ever written a story with a woman as the main character. He answered: ‘No, that was impossible because I could not imagine how a woman felt when alone.’ This was a brave and candid admission. It acknowledged an ...”

“... plot. The book has its origin in a ritual Kapil and her sister performed at a celebration of Kathy Acker at the ICA. The initial idea had been to take six frozen pig hearts and wash them as they melted, as if to make tactile the phrase that their racist neighbour had once screamed, ‘you bleeding animal’, a phrase that haunts both Ban and ...”

“... in the way she stacks her bookshelves: everything is arranged alphabetically by writer, with Kathy Acker slotted in next to Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution. Lucy’s 11-year-old daughter, Alida, disapproves of this ‘promiscuous mingling’. ‘Alida was hungry for realism. Most of her favourite books were non-fiction, like Anne Frank’s diary ...”

“... to read the Gothic too doctrinally through the lens of the Post-Modern, with Ann Radcliffe playing Kathy Acker; but the analogy is suggestive. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is convincingly read here as high camp. But there are important differences, too. Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it ...”

“... Aviv, Joshua Rivkin, Chiara Barzini), in the fictional footnotes, and real people (Kathy Acker, David Bowie, Connie Converse) in the fiction, and real people (Susan Sontag, Fleur Jaeggy, Kaitlin Phillips) in the real endnotes. Lacey has said her intent was random and irreverent – ‘There’s no hidden agenda or code,’ she told the New ...”

“... and the weighty, are given equal prominence.UbuWeb is a compendious resource of everything from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa, but has no systematic collection policy, being steered only by the instincts, enthusiasms and seemingly boundless energy of Goldsmith, a poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who founded it in 1996 (he is also a ...”

“... in large part thanks to Stefan’s habit of sending comp copies to anyone who might be interested. Kathy Acker, Gaston Bachelard, Graham Greene, Karl Popper: all responded appreciatively on receiving a Gaberbocchus in the post. Admirers were as likely to be eminently establishment as anti-establishment. Jean Dubuffet invited the Themersons for tea in ...”