Great Expectations

Kathy Acker’s practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious―as a rebel and a groundbreaker―when Great Expectations was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens’s classic―splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat’s sexually violent Eden, Eden, Eden, among other texts―alongside Acker’s trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God.At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death. 'New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world' Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations . Both familiar and unfamiliar, our orphaned narrator is transplanted to New York City in the 1980s; becoming, by turns, a sailor, a pirate, a rebel and an outlaw, through adventures incorporating desire, creativity, porn, sadism and art. This ribald explosion of literature, sex and violence shows the literary anarchist Kathy Acker at her most brilliant and brave. 'Acker's most accomplished experimental work' The Village Voice 'A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill' William S. Burroughs " ... At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker's protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother's suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death"--Provided by publisher. My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter.