Empire of the Senseless

London: Picador/ Pan Books, 1988. FIRST UK EDITION. 8vo, pp. 227, [5], incl. Acker's own b/w line drawings. Original black cloth, spine lettered in silver. Bruising to spine ends. Uneven tanning to edges, toned. Else, clean and tidy. In the original illustrated dust jacket: gentle creasing and wear to edges, gently toned on reverse. Very good/ very good Acker dedicated Empire of the Senseless to "my tattooist". Empire of the Senseless was the experimental writer and performance artist's fifth book from a major publisher and her first foray into science fiction. Despite its setting in the speculative near future, "it remains insolently rooted in the world in which we belong, anchored by Acker's stubborn commitment to rendering visible the sexist, racist, capitalistic, father-fucking societal ego of her time�and of our own. Kathy Acker is a muckraker in the original sense, one who dredges up the dirt and puts it on display to the delight and horror of the reading public." (Kleeman, 2018). Acker considered the novel a turning point in her writing life, with her literary appropriation less obvious. Nevertheless, she crafts her "elsewhere" from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Georges Bataille's The History of the Eye and William Gibson's Neuromancer. In her introduction to the Grove Atlantic edition of Acker's novel, Kleeman suggests: "don't just read this book; use it�as a tool, a hammer, a rock to smash in whatever barrier prevents you from imagining another better place." Alexandra Kleeman (2018)' The Future Is a Struggle: On Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless', The New Yorker online