In a process she described as "piracy," Kathy Acker appropriated the plots and titles of works such as Treasure Island, Great Expectations, and Don Quixote and rewrote them in her own novels to reflect a variety of feminist, political,...

Kathy Acker (b. 18 April 1947, Manhattan, d. 30 November 1997, Tijuana, Mexico) was an American experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, and sex-positive feminist writer. Considered the leading experimental writer of her generation ,...

Kathy Lehman, writer and performance artist: born New York April 1944; married first Robert Acker (marriage dissolved), secondly Peter Gordon (marriage dissolved); died London 29 November 1997. The punk turned post-modernist Kathy Acker was a controversial figure on the literary scene with her...

THE LEGACY OF KATHY ACKER The writer Lynne Tilman still remembers the electrifying impression made by Kathy Acker the first time Tillman saw her read in the late 1970s, in some long-gone Third Avenue joint. Acker was sitting cross-legged on a table, whispering...

In the following excerpt, Siegle offers an overview of Acker's literary significance and a critical reading of Don Quixote.

In the following essay, Friedman provides an overview of the intellectual, cultural, and literary contexts in which Acker's fiction, according to Friedman, is "designed to be jaws steadily devouring—often to readers' horror and certainly to their discomfort (which is part of the strategy)—the mindset, if not the mind of Western culture."

In the following essay, Sciolino examines Acker's hybrid synthesis of poststructural theory, postmodern fiction, and feminist discourse.