Pussy King Of The Pirates

A retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a dizzyingly imaginative foray through world history, literature, and language itself.

A reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Treasure Island, in which two prostitutes--O and Ange--use their earnings to hire a band of women pirates to mount an expedition to find treasure. A tale of sex and sado-masochism with thoughts on the human condition. By the author of My Mother: Demonology.

A collection of three early, self-published novels by the author of Empire of the Senseless. 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 for Kathy Acker and Portrait of an Eye “A countercultural hero who hybridized elements of punk, literary postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory in her public identity and in her literary works.” —New Republic “For Kathy, the breakthrough was her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula . . . she lifts lines from old biographies of murderesses. She adopts their picaresque style and switches out I for she. And suddenly, she’s off, and she can say anything.” —Chris Kraus, Paris Review

Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

In her 10th novel, Acker's heroine, Laurie, is a woman helpless before the fury of her emotions. Love-obsessed, Laurie is plunged into a harrowing dilemma--sexuality and her feminism are the two poles that threaten to obliterate her inner poise, the false magic of her woman's identity.

"From the book 'Pussy, king of the pirates' by Kathy Acker"--Title page verso.

"The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature. Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Senses; and Pussy, King of Pirates, Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution. She was notorious for her methods-collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critiques-as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today. Acker's life was as unruly and radical as her writing. Raised in a privileged but oppressive Upper East Side Jewish family, she turned her back on that world as soon as she could, seeking a life of romantic and intellectual adventure that led her to, and through, many of the most thrilling avant-garde and countercultural moments in America: the births of conceptual art and experimental music; the poetry wars of the 60s and 70s; the mainstreaming of hardcore porn; No Wave cinema and New Narrative writing; Riot grrls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. As this definitive biography shows, Acker was not just a singular writer, she was also a titanic cultural force who tied together disparate movements in literature, art, music, theatre, and film. A feat of literary biography, Eat Your Mind is the first full-scale, authorized life of Acker. Drawing on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker's intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work, acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride offers a thrilling account and a long overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist"--

Facing the trauma of an abortion, a young woman mentally escapes by setting out on a series of adventures as Don Quixote.

Recently discovered and never before published, these two short novels were written in the early 1970s, at the beginning of Acker's writing career. Published together here, they reveal a young writer on a literary romp, imposing an original, sexy, and subversive world view that is unmistakably Acker.