Acker, Kathy
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Theatre.
Pseudonym of US author Karen Lehmann (1947-1997), whose year of birth has been given variously but without documentary evidence as both 1944 and 1948; she lived in the UK off and on for many years. Acker's apocalyptic sense of the latter-day world is conveyed in works whose tortured absurdity (see Fabulation) sometimes catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the spectator of one of her plays, which have been as a whole perhaps more telling than her prose. The Birth of the Poet (performed 1984 Rotterdam; in Wordplays 5, anth 1986, ed anon) runs a gamut from the nuclear Holocaust depicted in the first act to the picaresque jigs and jags of the second and third. Three novels – Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986), a surrealistic afterlife fantasy; Empire of the Senseless (1988), which features a quest through a Near Future Paris-cum-America surreally evocative of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and the not-quite terminal coupling of fleshly beings and Robots; and Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), an erotized Dystopian adventure with echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) – are of interest. Her use of sf icons and decor in this last book resembles that of William S Burroughs, especially in its homage to Cyberpunk, conveyed by cut-ups of text by William Gibson. [JC]
Karen Lehmann
born New York: 14 April 1947 [1944 and 1948 have also been given but seem unlikely]
died Tijuana, Mexico: 30 November 1997
works
- Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works (London: Aloes Books, 1984) [story: chap: pb/Jim Pennington]
- The Birth of the Poet. In Wordplays 5: New American Drama (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986) [hb/]
- Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (London: Grafton Books/Paladin, 1986) [pb/Catherine Denvir]
- Empire of the Senseless (London: Picador, 1988) [illus/Kathy Acker: hb/Robert Mason]
- In Memoriam to Identity (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) [hb/]
- Hannibal Lecter, My Father (New York: Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 1991) [coll: pb/]
- Pussy, King of the Pirates (New York: Grove Press, 1996) [hb/]
- Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective; and the Burning Bombing of America (New York: Grove Press, 2002) [pb/]
- Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (New York: Grove Press, 2002) [edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper: pb/]
about the author
- Chris Kraus. After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography (South Pasadena, California: Semiotext(e), 2017) [nonfiction: gives 1947 as date of birth: hb/]
- Chris Kraus. After Kathy Acker: A Biography (London: Allen Lane, 2017) [nonfiction: vt of the above: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry