Grove Press, 2020

Introduction by Kate Zambreno

Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey toward the boundaries of modern fiction that has made her one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation.

From the start, Kathy Acker created a brash and sexy female voice as shocking as the worlds she invokes. In Childlike Life she steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer. In I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac she takes a man capable of deceiving both sexes as her lover in a dreamy odyssey through the labyrinth of her desires. In The Adult Life Toulouse Lautrec is a woman starved for love and sex.

All of Acker’s obsessions “the frenzy of sexual desire, the search for identity, the invention of a new literary language” are present here with savage purity and raw energy.