Dust: A Creation Books Reader

by Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, Pierre Guyotat

"The crucifixion of modern literature, the resurrection of the imagination." With this manifesto, Creation Books was launched. Here is a selection from its pages past, present and future, hallucinated or anatomical texts by writers estranged from the bind of linear narrative and "literary" values, and the establishment which seeks to perpetuate it.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Tina]

on the prowl for this used

[Michael X · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of writings I am baffled as to what they are about. An attempt to revitalize surrealism, but only succeeding in creating boredom.