About The Book

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.

Includes:

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula
I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining
The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec

Praise

“Kathy Acker’s trancelike writing style peels away the layers of reality… Acker is an expert at evoking this shadowy realm of belief and emotion where the rules of cause and effect do not necessarily apply.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.” –William S. Burroughs

“Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know.” –Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review