This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there. As such, we learn as much much about Kathy Acker as we do about the mores of the artists and writers who surrounded her in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Acker emerges as an unlikely literary hero, but an utterly convincing one. -- Sheila Heti, author of How Should A Person Be
The path of the female artist. Is hell.
Chris Kraus's veracious and intricately structured portrait rouses and stirs as it documents in meticulous and fascinating detail the life, work and body of Kathy Acker and what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero.'
-- Viv Albertine
'To lie is to try,' Chris Kraus writes in this examination of the various personae of Kathy Acker, the fucked-up girl from high school who, through lying and trying, became an experimental writer of rare courage and vision. In some ways a contemporary and in some ways as far off as the days when people moved to New York and San Francisco for the cheap rent, Acker needed a key, and Chris Kraus provides it. -- Ben Moser
Chris Kraus's
After Acker sets the bar for what will surely be a new era of critical and biographical reckoning with the life and work of Kathy Acker. Kraus had a ringside seat, has done her homework, and here provides a substantive effort to pay homage not only to the complex, singular, raucous, and crucial writer and human that Acker was, but also to the constellation of artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers who were her friends, lovers, inspirations, and fellow makers of history. -- Maggie Nelson
Hardly anyone writes better or more insightfully than Chris Kraus about the lives of women and artists. After Kathy Acker is an intense, riveting portrait of a writer who was raw and savvy, fragile and brilliant, whose self-deceptions were inseparable from her greatness. Quotes from her profane and passionate journals reveal Kathy the crazy poet, the bad girlfriend, the Upper East Side schoolgirl, the downtown writer, Kathy in love and in denial. Gossipy, sexy, tragic, terrific. -- Julie Phillips, author of The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Kraus's latest book,
After Kathy Acker, about the late experimental writer, is a departure in genre-it's Kraus's first biography-but it's still committed to her driving questions about art and community and risk, especially this one: How do you make fearless art from the messy stuff of consciousness? -- Leslie Jamison * Interview *
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. -- Lauren Elkin * Financial Times *
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. * Lenny Letter *
It's impossible to overstate the monumentality of these minds side-by-side... 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 * Orlando Weekly *
Kraus is a generous, admiring, but not uncritical narrator in this comprehensive biography of author Kathy Acker a post-punk icon for the Bush/Thatcher years. * Publisher's Weekly *
Kraus reconstitutes Acker's wanderings with real wit and beauty, understanding without pandering to the painfully high stakes of her identity games -- Olivia Laing * Guardian *
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 pushes Acker's writing to the foreground making us understand how difficult a territory the so-called avant-garde was, and is, for a woman. -- Suzanne Moore * New Statesman *
Kraus goes beneath the image that has ossified around Acker since her death (tattooed, buzz cut, sex-positive) and reaffirms her identity as a hard-working writer with a deep-rooted knowledge of her craft, steeped in classical literature as much as Burroughs and the Beats. She boldly places Acker as the first woman to shoot for the counter-cultural hero, the swashbuckling literary seeker. -- Victoria Segal * The Sunday Times *
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. -- Anna Ioane * Los Angeles Review of Books *
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. * Dazed and Confused *
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. -- Spectator * Sam Byers *
I loved
After Kathy Acker, an appropriately eccentric biography of the post-punk author that restores her to her rightful place in the literary history of the past 40 years -- Matthew d'Anacona * Evening Standard *
It used to be Plath, but now some part of every girl writer will want to be like Kathy Acker, especially those who are interested in pain; whether pain as kink or pain as artistic production. Her life was a hot mess, and these pages capture the heat of it.
After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus (Allen Lane) is hectic, less than objective, very much alive. -- Anne Enright * Guardian *
