Synopses & Reviews
With
Great Expectations Kathy Acker finds a new language with which to snare the elusive moment of being alive in the Eighties. Her slippery narrator -- at times Peter, both homosexual and heterosexual, exchanging identities with Sara, his girl friend, or Rosa, the brothel whore and female terrorist, as well as many other incarnations of the storytelling "I" -- flits in and out of an ever-changing setting of scenes that moves from New York to Alexandria, from an unnamed battlefield to ancient Rome, and back to Manhattan.
Acker performs these dizzying transformations with a narrative drive that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride from one explosive sequence to another. Always she makes her own rules to produce a prose with the roar of passion. As ghosts of books by other authors walk through these pages to be transformed into new and often startling shapes, Acker deploys the full vocabulary and iconography of sex as well as humor, by turns sly, punning, slapstick, and ironic.
What emerges always homes in fiercely on the truth about the emotions, ideas, dreams, and nightmares of men, women, and our society. It is, ultimately, a rich, brave, and worshipful work that redeems all aspects of life with its visionary fire.
Review
"Great Expectations is Kathy Acker's most ambitious, most exciting and masterful novel to date. Its influence will be long and strongly felt. The novel is as revolutionary in form as it is in content." Steve Abbot, Poetry Flash
Review
"Kathy Acker's most accomplished experimental work. (Hers is) a female voice that goes beyond feminism, artistic freedom turned into an artistic lifestyle." Sally O'Driscoll, Village Voice
Synopsis
Using postmodern form, Kathy Ackers Great Expectations moves her narrator through time, gender, and identity as it examines our eras cherished beliefs about life and art.
Synopsis
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About the Author
KATHY ACKER (1948-1997) is the author of many novels, including I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac!: Imagining, Empire of the Senseless, My Mother: Demonology, A Novel, and Pussy, King of the Pirates.