Lust for Life

Scholars and artists on the transgressive twentieth-century literary icon

Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and plagiarist, her oeuvreover a dozen novels and novellashas inspired a generation of writers and artists.

Co-edited by Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder, Lust for Life is the definitive collection of essays on Acker’s inimitable work, including Peter Wollen’s elegiac primer, widely considered the best introduction to Acker, and Avital Ronell’s erudite meditation on friendship and mourning. Together these essays by scholars and writers reveal Acker’s profound and innovative project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.

Reviews

Acker may be the true mother of Brat Pack writers like Brett Easton Ellis, but there isn’t disgust in her work ... Transgression is never disgust—it is a way of surviving.
—Jeanette Winterson

From the fringes, an outsider, Kathy Acker penetrated the heart of American culture with a superb and wicked intellectual force we had not seen before.
—Sapphire

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

“Ackerville,” Gary Indiana, London Review of Books, December 2006.