Agent Bait

Christopher Tayler: Nell Zink, 2 March 2017

Nicotine 
by Nell Zink.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2016, 978 0 00 817917 5
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Private Novelist 
by Nell Zink.
Ecco, 336 pp., $15.99, October 2016, 978 0 06 245830 8
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... I like them so much’. She throws in a translation of a piece by Robert Walser, pays tribute to Kathy Acker and boasts of not having read or even seen a single book by Raymond Carver. Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers are said to be better than the complete works of Faulkner and Burroughs, and there are many discussions of George Eliot. At the ...

Propellers for Noses

Dennis Duncan: The Themerson Archive, 9 June 2022

The Themerson Archive Catalogue 
edited by Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley.
MIT, three vols, 1000 pp., £190, November 2020, 978 1 9162474 1 3
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... 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 ...

Cervantics

Robin Chapman, 18 September 1986

Don Quixote 
by E.C. Riley.
Allen and Unwin, 224 pp., £18, February 1986, 0 04 800009 4
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Don Quixote – which was a dream 
by Kathy Acker.
Paladin, 207 pp., £2.95, April 1986, 0 586 08554 8
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... to my own The Duchess’s Diary of 1980, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote of 1982, and now Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote – which was a dream. The 18th century seized on the work as a model for developing the English novel, with Smollett and Fielding particularly indebted to Cervantes. The Romantic movement, especially in Germany, inevitably ...

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems 
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5
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Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7
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... Jeff Nuttall (Four Door Guide), Barry MacSweeney (that more simple natural time tone distortion), Kathy Acker (Visible Shivers). They’re not like the other books on that shelf, they’re coffee-splashed, cigarette-burned, warped, read. But poets’ libraries are dispersed frequently; reassembled, dispersed again. The arrival of blockbuster ...

In the Box

Dale Peck, 6 February 1997

How Stella Got Her Groove Back 
by Terry McMillan.
Viking, 368 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 670 86990 2
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Push 
by Sapphire.
Secker, 142 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 436 20291 3
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The Autobiography of My Mother 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Vintage, 228 pp., £8.99, September 1996, 0 09 973841 4
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... half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the phrase, at this ...

Off-Beat

Iain Sinclair, 6 June 1996

... and mirror interrogations grew harsher and harsher. There were more stories of bad behaviour. Kathy Acker remembers being dumped from a car in the middle of the night, in a Panther-controlled area of Oakland, for refusing to take part in a Corso threesome. There were scuffles outside Burroughs’s Lower East Side bunker. ‘It’s always like this ...

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3
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Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5
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... continuity rather than disruption by the irrational, or confrontational postmodernism à la Kathy Acker. Surrealistic effects​ , nevertheless – not easy to control in prose – are part of Williams’s repertoire. She sometimes resorts to dream logic as a way of finishing a story, so that the newlyweds of ‘The Wedding’ levitate ...