Three Centuries Of Alexandria Silver

Acker, Kathy: Pussy, King of the Pirates, NY Grove Press 1996
ISBN: 0-8021-1578-0 Fine in Fine Dust Jacket Dust Jacket Design and Illustration By James Victore; Endpaper Illustration By Michael Delsol; Book Design By Laura Hammond Hough

"Kathy Acker (born April 18, 1947 in Manhattan and died November 30, 1997 in Tijuana, Mexico) is an American sex-positive feminist writer. After supporting herself as a stripper, Acker's first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York literary underground of the mid-1970s. She remained on the margins of the literary establishment, only being published by small presses until the mid-1980s, thus earning herself the epithet of literary terrorist. 1984 saw her first British publication, a novel called Blood and Guts in High School. From here on Kathy produced a considerable body of novels, almost all still in print with Grove Press. She wrote pieces for a number of magazines and anthologies, and also had notable pieces printed in issues of ReSearch and Rapid Eye. Towards the end of her life she had a measure of success in the conventional press--the Guardian newspaper published several of her articles, including an interview with the Spice Girls, which she submitted just a few months before her death. Acker's formative influences are American poets and writers (the Black Mountain poets, especially Jackson Mac Low, and William S. Burroughs), as well as literary theory, especially Michel Foucault. In her work, she combines plagiarism, cut-up techniques, pornography, autobiography, persona, and the personal essay to confront expectations of what fiction should be. In this vein, she acknowledges language's performative function in drawing attention to the instability of female identity in male narrative and literary history (Don Quixote), creates parallelism in characters and autobiographical personas, and rids of pronouns, thus upsetting conventional syntax. In In Memoriam to Identity, she draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Though she is known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she is also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, rape, and violence." - Wikepedia. " Once again displaying her penchant-and talent-for scavenging extant texts, Acker (My Mother: Demonology) exploits Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Pauline Reage's The Story of O, among other sources, fusing the carnal, the cerebral and the surreal into a fantastical tale. The story spans centuries and continents as it chronicles the adventures of O and Ange, whores who retire from the trade and hire a band of girl-pirates to help them find buried treasure. Told mostly through dreams and dream states and with casual shifts in point of view, the novel divides roughly into three sections. The first, "O and Ange," recounts the two women's days of prostitution: in China, O begins whoring at the request of a boyfriend; she then makes a pilgrimage to "the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria," where she meets Ange, with whom she escapes and discovers a map of buried treasure. The second section, "The Pirate Girls," introduces "King" Pussy, her youth, her two abortions and her sexual history. In the final section, "In the Days of the Pirates," O and Ange hire the pirate-girls and set sail for the treasure island. Acker writes a deliberately affectless, deadpan prose, rendering both the absurd and the disturbing (including several graphic sexual and physiological episodes) with a declarative nonchalance. Like Acker's other work, this campy and enigmatic novel is self-consciously provocative as she detonates her battery of literary and sexual references in order to illuminate themes of masochism and rebellion-but it's also often funny and invariably intelligent." - Publishers Weekly. vi, 282pp. Black paper boards, silver gilt spine lettering, illustrated endpapers, deckled fore-edge. Dust jacket price 21.00. Signed by AUTHOR to half-title page. Book and dust jacket are in As New, unread condition. Small, light remainder dot bottom edge. Signed by Author First Edition Fine Hard Cover 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall

[SW: LITERATURE FIRST EDITIONS]

Details