Kathy Acker wrote 13 novels and published one collection of essays before her death from cancer, aged 53, in 1997. Born in New York, she began writing when she returned there in the early 1970s after studying at Brandeis and the University of California, San Diego, a brief marriage, and spells working as a stripper, a bakery clerk and in several other eccentric jobs. She spent a few years as part of Manhattan's downtown art scene, where she was regarded as both wunderkind and irritant. Then she began a series of restless migrations: to France, Britain, San Francisco. She chose to die in Mexico, in a dubious clinic: she had always thought of herself as a permanent exile.

LRB 14 December 2006 | PDF Download