Empire of the Senseless

kathy acker

Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part-robot part-human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Genres fictionscience fictionnovelsfeminismliteraturelgbtqueerliterary fictiondystopiawomens

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1988

This edition

Format: 240 pages, Paperback
Published: January 13, 1994 by Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802131799
ASIN: 0802131794
Language: English

About the author

kathy acker

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.