Portrait of an Eye by Kathy Acker

Portrait of an Eye by Kathy Acker

Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know. -New York Times Book Review

A subversive triptych of novels from legendary punk author, Kathy Acker, reissued with a new introduction from Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines, Screen Tests, Green Girl, and others.

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker's first novel and the opening of the three-novel collection Portrait of an eye, was initially self-published as episodic handmade pamphlets that were mailed to influential writers and artists. In this work which would make her name as an experimental stylist (New Republic), Acker steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer, and mixes in fragments from porn, historical romance, pulp fiction, and The Story of O. Collected with her second novel, the dreamy odyssey through desire I dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac, and her third, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Portrait of an Eye is a dive into the frenzy of sexual desire, the search for identity, and the invention of a new literary language.

Now reissued with a new introduction by Kate Zambreno, revisiting the novels in Portrait of an Eyereminds us of all there is still to learn from Kathy Acker, whose work remains radical and uncanny, entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature (Guardian).

Kathy Acker (nee Karen Alexander) (18 April 1947 - 30 November 1997) was an American experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. One of the leading experimental writers of her generation, she was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.Born and raised in New York City, Acker came to be closely associated with the punk movement of the 1970s and '80s that affected much of the culture in and around Manhattan. As an adult, however, she moved around quite a bit. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1968; there she worked with David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg. Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973 she published her first novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses under the pseudonym Black Tarantula. In 1974 she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining.In 1979 Acker finally received popular attention when she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story New York City in 1979. She did not receive critical attention, however, until she published Great Expectations in 1982.