Blood and Guts in High School - Softcover

Acker, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080213193X ISBN 13: 9780802131935

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994

Synopsis

Jamey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing. Once day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down he life, starting with "Parents stink" (Her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her). With "Blood and Guts in High School, " Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everthing from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.

About this title

Review:

Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill (William S. Burroughs)

A coming-of-age story which examines incest and paedophilia with a profoundly Sadist literary bent ... can be credited with moving mainstream literature into indie territory. (A Stevens Guardian)

Acker's work, more than that of any other writer I can think of, challenged the traditional lines of demarcation between poetry and novel, between high culture and popular trash and, perhaps most important of all, between literature and art world. (London Review of Books Peter Wollen)

[Kathy Acker is] part rebel bohemian avant-gardiste, part NYC downtown punk, and part venerable literary grande dame (Michael Bracewell)

Twenty years after her death and I still miss her (Neil Gaiman)

Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul (William S. Burroughs)

Acker understands that writing without myth is nothing (Chris Kraus)

Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer (Jeanette Winterson)

Scarified sensibility,subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other (The New York Times Review of Books)

An avatar of nomadic urban modern primitive tribes... her novels perform postmodern campfire grill voodoo... She was a magician (R.U. Sirius)

From the Back Cover:

'You exist in this darkness. Rebels. Creeps. Outcasts. Loners. People who hate everybody'

This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon.

'A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill' William S. Burroughs

'Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame' Jeanette Winterson

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 080213193X
• ISBN 13: 9780802131935
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 165