Blood and Guts in High School
The book that shocked a generation and introduced Kathy Acker as the enfant terrible of the 1980s literary underground This is a book about feminism, capitalism, sex, punk, youth, the city, the literary giants, anger, infatuation and the USA. A teenage coming-of-age story and a glorious, delirious patchwork of prose, poetry, drama, plagiarism and illustration. Childlike sexual drawings pepper the book, along with Acker's surreal, minutely detailed, annotated 'dream maps'. Hugely controversial upon its publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School has lost none of its power to shock and is still revered by readers today.
Kathy Acker was born in 1947 and was raised in New York City. In her twenties she broke ties with her family and worked as a stripper, while writing and publishing in the underground literary scene. The 1984 publication of Blood and Guts in High School caused a sensation - the book was at the centre of a surge of media attention. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she abandoned Western medicine after a traumatic experience of surgery. She died in an alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997.Her major novels include Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Don Quixote and Pussy, King of the Pirates. A collection of her emails with cultural theorist McKenzie Wark was published in 2015, titled I'm Very into You.
Author: Kathy Acker
Format: Paperback, 176 pages, 130mm x 198mm, 134 g
Published: 2017, Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom
Genre: General & Literary Fiction
The book that shocked a generation and introduced Kathy Acker as the enfant terrible of the 1980s literary underground This is a book about feminism, capitalism, sex, punk, youth, the city, the literary giants, anger, infatuation and the USA. A teenage coming-of-age story and a glorious, delirious patchwork of prose, poetry, drama, plagiarism and illustration. Childlike sexual drawings pepper the book, along with Acker's surreal, minutely detailed, annotated 'dream maps'. Hugely controversial upon its publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School has lost none of its power to shock and is still revered by readers today.
Kathy Acker was born in 1947 and was raised in New York City. In her twenties she broke ties with her family and worked as a stripper, while writing and publishing in the underground literary scene. The 1984 publication of Blood and Guts in High School caused a sensation - the book was at the centre of a surge of media attention. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she abandoned Western medicine after a traumatic experience of surgery. She died in an alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997.Her major novels include Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Don Quixote and Pussy, King of the Pirates. A collection of her emails with cultural theorist McKenzie Wark was published in 2015, titled I'm Very into You.