10 classics to celebrate International Women’s Day 

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Reading lists

10 classics to celebrate International Women’s Day

New York City in 1979

'INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD' 
 
A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy Acker 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Kathy Acker was born in 1948 and was raised in New York. In her twenties she broke ties with her family and worked as a stripper, while writing and publishing with the underground literary scene. She burst into the mainstream with Blood and Guts in High School, which caused a sensation upon publication in 1987 - the book was banned in several countries. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she abandoned Western medicine after a traumatic experience of surgery to treat the cancer, which was unsuccessful. She died in an alternative treatment centre in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997. 
 
Her major novels include Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Don Quixote and Pussy, King of the Pirates. A collection of her emails with McKenzie Wark was published in 2015, titled I'm Very into You.

'INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD' 
 
A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy Acker

Blood and Guts in High School

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'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 
 
'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 
 
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. 
 
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill

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.

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.

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

Twenty years after her death and I still miss her

Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul

Acker understands that writing without myth is nothing

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

Scarified sensibility,subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other

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

Reading Kathy Acker is like playing hopscotch with a genius

Kathy Acker was born in 1947 and was raised in New York City. In her twenties she broke ties with her family and worked as a stripper, while writing and publishing in the underground literary scene. The 1984 publication of Blood and Guts in High School caused a sensation - the book was at the centre of a surge of media attention. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she abandoned Western medicine after a traumatic experience of surgery. She died in an alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997.Her major novels include Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Don Quixote and Pussy, King of the Pirates. A collection of her emails with cultural theorist McKenzie Wark was published in 2015, titled I'm Very into You.

Kathy Acker

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 writing today who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.

Acker's most ambitious, most exciting and masterful novel to date... The novel is as revolutionary in form as it is in content.

'New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world' 
 
Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations. Both familiar and unfamiliar, our orphaned narrator is transplanted to New York City in the 1980s; becoming, by turns, a sailor, a pirate, a rebel and an outlaw, through adventures incorporating desire, creativity, porn, sadism and art. This ribald explosion of literature, sex and violence shows the literary anarchist Kathy Acker at her most brilliant and brave.

Kathy Acker

Praise for Great Expectations

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 writing today who manage to blend that kin ...

Acker's most ambitious, most exciting and masterful novel to date... The novel is as revolutionary in form as it is in content.

Books by Kathy Acker

Articles featuring Kathy Acker

10 classics to celebrate International Women’s Day

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