Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel

Man this book is crazy. Read it for an experimental fiction class. Great poetic stuff here. Can be dark and tough to read a points. Not suitable for children.

transgressive fiction is rarely done well, and generally lapses into sloppy self-indulgence and outright self-parody in short order. acker was a brilliant writer who could bedazzle you or make your skin crawl more/less at will. the book is lewd, pornographic, savage, funny, and casually heartbreaking. acker can make you sick and then laugh at you for your dainty moral squeamishness. parts of the book fall flat, but when she's at her best acker is viciously effective.

There is no one like Kathy Acker! She disassembles and recreates language through her work and other authors. Nothing is untouchable. Everything can be recreated! LOVE! Explosive!

Pros: Like most of the books I've been reading lately (Gulliver's Travels, The Gallic Wars, Gardens of the Moon) this book contains some brilliant prose. The parts where Acker deconstructs the Scarlet Letter, comments on capitalist language, and provides the philosophy of the slave trader are particularly good. Even in less coherent passages, it is at least vivid. It is also short. Cons: Its brevity is a good thing because also like most of the books I've been reading lately, over half the novel is pointless. In this case, the narrative gets so abstract that you can just skip over anything that begins to repeat itself or that makes no sense. Also in this case, the answer as to why the author chose to do this is in the novel - it's a rebellion against capitalist interest. The language is intentionally bad to deny the very people it is criticizing. If you bought the book, as I did, you are the scum she is talking about. Most people won't like this sort of criticism, and even if they do, as I did, it was still a pretty big waste of time. In a way, I love that this novel is pulling down every reader that picks it up. I can respect that kind of spite. Summary: If you read this novel, you are its victim. If you are interested in that, then by all means read it. It wont be a pleasant journey, but you maybe satisfied anyway.

I like to consider myself edgy but maybe I need to re-think my reading material through again. East Village, Performance Artist, Rebel Etc. YEAH MAN sounds like a fun read....NOT. Just rambling on and on about blah blah blah Etc. I know this type of writing falls into a hip category of writing but I just don't get it. Some authors can do it but most cannot. I need a story....characters ,,,,feelings ....dreams material to make me think. This doesn't provide any of that. I finished it out of habit.

insanely good, therapeutic, painful, glorious, one of the best reads out there.

So bizarre but a quick and fascinating read. I would not recommend this as subway material given the illustrations.

The book is shocking to see what the author could get away with. It's rambling and repetitive. At one point it turns into an X rated retelling of "the scarlet letter." What? It's so poorly written I can't believe it was ever published.

According to the author of Blood And Guts writers create what they do out of their own frightful agony and blood and mushed up guts and horrible mixed up insides. Blood And Guts purports to be A Girls Own Story. A girl who was kept in a locked room by a slave trader.A girl who was taught to be a whore. A girl who found a scrap of paper and decided to put pen to paper. A girl called Janey. A girl who writes about Love + Death, Sex + Pain , Punk + Anarchy , Jean Genet + Street Gangs. Poems. Prose. Plagiarism. Politics. Drawings + Illustrations. Written in the 1970s the girl visits the hip-est place in America at that time - New York's Rock n Roll club CBGBs. Instead of Lou Reed, William Burroughs + Patti Smith, our heroine meets the American President - Jimmy Carter. After lots of energetic sex, she falls in Love with him. U couldn't make this up. But Kathy Acker just has !!!!

Visual art + writing = I'm speechless. Thought-provoking and masterful work of art.

Excelente edición corregida. Viene con ilustraciones de la autora. Me encanta la forma en la que escribe. Pero hay que leer el prólogo y entender un poco el contexto para no sacarse de onda con las temáticas. Muy punk, crudo, visceral. Si te gusta Chuck Palaniuk e Irvin Welsh. Te va a gustar

It’s such fun to read a book by someone with a clear intent to guck things up and make the reader think a little. There are sketches and poetry: there’s humor and seriousness though never sobriety. There’s sex and deviation. Some of which has dated; some of which feels relevant and fresh. There’s nothing around today that does anything like this. And we’re worse off for it.

I guess I read this to see what it was all about - it feels dated to me now, and I probably should have it read it years ago - it feels contrived. I don't believe the voice. But it is very smart, and witty. Colourful.