Blood and Guts in High School

by Kathy Acker

Book Overview

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight--with a new introduction by Chris Kraus--continues to become...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802127622
• ISBN13: 9780802127624
• Release Date: November 2017
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Acker Rocks

First, an anecdote: I taught this text a few years ago in a fiction class at a mediocre university in the south. In short, it completely polarized the students. The smart kids almost all loved it and the idiots HATED it--some of them turned in hilarious papers where they railed about the work's indecency, talked about sin, etcetera. This particular book is, in my opinion, Acker's best. The consensus seems to be that _Empire of the Senseless_ is her masterpiece but it's always left me a little cold. Regardless, she's the best synthesizer of the tradition since Eliot (with whom she shared literary tastes, oddly). The Mekons loved her. Read this and suck less.

give it another chance!

I disagree with a number of the previous reviewers. I think Acker uses her style effectively to drive a point home. She is rewriting the canon from a perspective of pain and oppression and her way of doing this is by attacking the very language that aids in her oppression. Janie must relearn language in her own way, hence we watch this process begin through drawings and a relaearning of the alphabet and finally a reconstruction and retelling of well known tales (e.g. The Scarlet Letter). Rather than being only dark and painful, I found the end to be somewhat uplifting by offering a glimmer of hope through the banding together of society's castoffs. It's a difficult book, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in seeing what happens when an author attempts to rewrite a personal history and in doing so urges us all to deconstruct our own narratives.

A Map of My Dreams-- by Janey

Janey is a little girl wandering through a fantasy landscape of men who reject her-- her father, Jean Genet, the Persian Slave Trader, Tommy. This is a book communicating a world of pain-- the dialogues in the beginning between Janey and her father as he prepares to leave her for someone else carry the weight of the agony of someone being betrayed by someone so close and all the little lies and tricks we use to pull closer and push away. It's also a book about illness. Janey constantly has pain and infections and disease that cripple her, but she always pushes the physical pain to one side to focus on the men who she knows from the beginning are going to leave her. It is not the easiest book in the world to read-- the emotion, rather than the plot, is the thread that ties the book together. There's a section in the book which is a series of drawings by Janey that provide a map to her dreams. I used this map to give the reading experience a kind of structure and I found that thinking about the book as a dream landscape made the lack of narrative much less jarring.

Have fun. Read a book

First of all , this is not just a book ,this we have it's also a map toa trip that never happens. Was the persian slave trader real , or was it on Janie's mind? We'll never know for sure , but it's a devastating experience to read how people can need so desperatly the love they will never achieve. I am an esceptic reader , and so i suspect of the real pretension of the writer , but as a book (or whatever...) it caused a major impression on me.I guess we all got a little Janie inside of us.