Treasure Island Turned On Its Head
ACKER, Kathy. Pussy: King of the Pirates. New York: Grove Press. 1996.
8vo. Original black boards with silver lettering to spine; illustrated endpapers; pages untrimmed; unclipped black dust jacket with pink flaps; pp. [xiii], 277, [10]; fine.
First edition.
"Acker's writing is beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame" - Jeanette Winterson.
By the 1970s, Kathy Acker was a renowned post-punk Anarchist whose outrageous content (extreme pornography, intentional creative plagiarism) is still polarising both on a a stylistic and conceptual level. William Burroughs was her mentor and she maintained a similair disrespect for the classical literary canon, debasing male titles such as Don Quixote and Great Expectations by locating them in her own fragmentary and ill-disciplined worlds.
Pussy: King of the Pirates finds etymology in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island; instead it is a feminist reinterpretation of a pirate story that time travels from the most famous "whorehouse" in Alexandria all the way through Brighton, England until finally reaching Pirate Island, where the manic stories converge.
Always one to manipulate language through her use of disparate narratives and voices, Kathy Acker still remains the incredibly contentious figure she was during the rock and roll culture of the 1990's and of Postmodern Literature itself.
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