
GUARDIAN EVENING STANDARD & BOOKFORUM BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 Kathy Acker Rich girl street punk scholar stripper victim media-whore & cultural icon The late Kathy Acker's legend & writings are wrapped in mythologies many of them created by her Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50 Acker's legend has faded but her writing has become clearer A few years ago the writer Chris Kraus author of I Love Dick found that her own experiences were becoming more & more like Kathy's She began writing about Acker 'through the distance but with this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write "I" instead of "she"' This is 'literary friction' The first fully authorised biography of the avant-garde writer Kathy Acker by the woman who arrived on the scene straight after her who shared some of her boyfriends & friends & her artistic ambitions Using exhaustive archival research & ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues & friends Kraus traces the woman behind the notorious novels & places her at the centre of a kaleidoscopic artistic world' The path of the female artist Is hell Chris Kraus's veracious & intricately structured portrait rouses & stirs as it documents in meticulous & fascinating detail the life work & body of Kathy Acker & what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero' Viv Albertine' 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' Sheila Heti