Gary Indiana

From the London Review dated 14 December 2006

Ackerville

Kathy Acker approached writing as a technical challenge, setting stringent rules for the writing of her novels. She treated every new project as a game, deciding in advance which ingredients, and in what proportion, each book would contain. Her core subjects and themes never varied: they sprang from an immutable set of personal traumas and fixations. However playful her methods, and whatever Perec-like constraints she imposed on herself, Acker’s unassuageable anger at her victimisation as a woman poured into her fractured narratives. Her first writings – quirky, stream-of-consciousness, deceptively confessional – are whimsically strewn with pornography, violence, black humour and incongruous cultural references. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography