“In this first authorized biography of Acker, Kraus refracts these myths through the prism of a deep archive of letters, diaries, published work, and interviews with those who knew her to offer a loving portrait of an artist that is also a tremendous pleasure to read.(…) Like Acker, Chris Kraus has made big art from a big life.”
“Ultimately, Kraus entwines accounts of a writer into an impressive tapestry, with Acker emerging from the chaos of a difficult life. Almost 20 years after her death, she stands out for her total lack of compromise and dedication to her craft, and the result is a figure whose shock tactics refuse to date.”
“Kraus is both present and absent in this book, creating an intriguing tension. For the most part, she relies on Acker’s remarkable letters, allowing her to speak for herself. Presented with a passage of text, or an early art project, Kraus is an erudite, often unconventional critic. ”
“To pin down the real Kathy Acker then is a self-defeating task but Chris Kraus’s biography of her is a brilliant and necessary thing. There is a wonderful ambivalence between subject and object here, which wires up a tension throughout this incredibly well-researched book.”
“Kraus intelligently brings together the myths around Acker, and then breaks them apart, offering us the tantalizing prospect not just of Acker’s unrealized digital redemption, but a proper reckoning with what she left in her wake.”
“Kraus deftly sews up the gaps with thought-provoking and context-building information throughout the text, making for a pleasurable and informative read. One might even say that Kraus’s biography formally parallels Acker’s work, which hums with intentionality and indeterminancy.”
” […] Kraus is not interested in giving us an exceptional female genius. She gives us an “unlikable” female character instead: a captivating, vexing, contradictory artist who influenced and was influenced, who exuded power and vulnerability at once, who was part of a vibrant artistic ecology that alternately adored and rebuffed her, and who, above all else, left us far too soon.”
“Reading Ulysses, Virginia Woolf said of James Joyce that he was like a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”. I felt something similar on returning to Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984), for Acker is not for the faint of heart; her books often focus on a young woman over the edge, out in the dirty places in American culture, like a punk perverted Alice. Now, thanks to Chris Kraus’s thoughtful, sympathetic biography, the doubters can perhaps find their way towards an appreciation of this enfant terrible of late 20th-century American literature. Kraus, author of the cult 1997 novel I Love Dick, is the perfect mediator for Acker, finding in her work an aesthetics of provocation, discomfiture, risk and radical empathy.”
“[…] After Kathy Acker chronicles her childhood and her relentless pursuit of fame and notoriety until her eventual death of complications from breast cancer in 1997. “I have to make all my living as interesting to myself as my writing,” she telegrammed a friend in 1982. It’s a remarkable way to live.
Now that we have Chris’s completely enthralling book, a new generation of writers will be inspired by Kathy. It’s a gift to Kathy Acker and her legacy, and a gift to all the women who read Chris’s books and shared her books and posted passages of her books on Tumblr and who made it possible for I Love Dick to exist as an Amazon series starring Kevin Bacon. Now that Chris has our attention, she’s drawing us toward her muses. There’s something quite beautiful about that.”
“[…] Chris Kraus’ literary biography After Kathy Acker (MIT Press, Aug. 18) also aims at revised historical and critical recognition. At a moment less hostile to Acker’s digressive first-person fiction, Kraus – a writer, filmmaker and founder of Semiotext(e) imprint Native Agents – channels an influx of popular attention from the television adaptation of her novel I Love Dick – which shares a psychosexual confessionalism with Acker’s best known works – to redefine the disruptive intensity in her subject’s perceived vulnerability, shining a blacklight over the white lies of her self-made mythologies.
It’s impossible to overstate the monumentality of these minds side-by-side. Keen Acker readers are familiar with the semi-autobiographical tales recycled across her works, but Kraus dodges those magical thoughts and focuses on examining Acker as a “semi-controllable continuum” who worked with her memories until “they became conduits to something a-personal, until they became myth.” Kraus combines biography and philosophy, exhibiting intimate familiarity with not only French critical theory – one of Acker’s primary inspirations– but also the punk poet’s vast “constellation of influences.” Reading tarot, interpreting astrological signs, Kraus mimics the disjunction of Acker’s identities by intercutting diary entries and excerpts from her correspondence, embracing fragmentation as a method for inquiry.”
Best August Books List:
“In her life and work, radical punk writer Kathy Acker assaulted the male hegemony of narrative fiction with her transgressive experimental books, including Blood & Guts in High School and her re-appropriation of Great Expectations. As true to these ideals in life, Acker begat a full mythology. “Acker understands that writing without myth is nothing,” writes Kraus, Semiotext(e) editor, author of I Love Dick, and now author of Acker’s first biography. After Kathy Acker, according to Sheila Heti, “feels like it’s being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there.” (Anne)
“Kraus (I Love Dick) is a generous, admiring, but not uncritical narrator in this comprehensive biography of author Kathy Acker (1947–1997), “a post-punk icon for the Bush/Thatcher years.” Kraus uses Acker’s personal notebooks and correspondence, along with interviews with Acker’s friends, to chronicle not just Acker’s life but a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the 1980s and early ’90s. Acker emerges here as a prolific self-mythologizer, but Kraus shows an impressive ability to clear away her subject’s fabrications while tracing Acker’s life from her upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to her death from breast cancer at 50. Without ever sensationalizing Acker’s personal history, Kraus explores Acker’s dysfunctional childhood and complicated sex life, which became the content of Acker’s inescapably autobiographical work. Kraus proves a master of her craft, displaying a wry sense of humor and giving fine-tuned close readings of Acker’s writing. She takes subtle jabs at Acker’s obsession with image and taste for conspicuous consumption, noting how Acker’s back tattoo and motorcycles burnished her public persona. Ultimately, Kraus convincingly demonstrates that Acker was a fiercely intelligent writer of “discursive first-person fiction.” The book will excite fans of Acker, though those less interested in her work might find the level of detail heavy going.”
After Kathy Acker 