3.5
Great Expectations
ByPublisher Description
Kathy Acker's practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious—as a rebel and a groundbreaker—when
was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens's classic—splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat's sexually violent
, among other texts—alongside Acker's trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God.
At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker's protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother's suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death.
"
in its boisterousness and strong language and sense of the injustice-of-it-all is closely related to Henry Miller." —Carolyn See,
"Acker's most accomplished experimental work. . . . As she says in
, "a narrative is an emotional moving." It should be, but she's one of the few people . . . who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill." —Sally O'Driscoll,
"[Acker's] most completely unified work of art. . . . One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist." —Alain Robbe-Grillet
"A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill." —William S. Burroughs
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesGreat Expectations Reviews
3.5
“Acker is the queen of literary anarchy.”
“I appreciated some of the genre shifts but ultimately this was a little too chaotic for me”
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