Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School - August 18th, 2024

In 1973, Kathy Acker published her first novel (under the pseudonym Black Tarantula), "The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses." After a series of unsuccessful contracts to publish "Blood and Guts in High School," Acker debuted the novel in London with Picador, followed by publication in New York by Grove Press in 1984.

“While 'Blood and Guts' propelled [Acker’s] mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed 'Blood and Guts' in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973 … [Here,] working on her first serial novel, 'The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula,' she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself toward a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs … The novel chronicles and melds the writing process she’d begun with 'Childlike Life.' During those five years, she’d written two more serial novels—'The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec' (1975) and 'I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining' (1975)—as well as two book-length experiments in genre-ridden narrative, 'Rip-Off Red' (1973) and 'Kathy Goes to Haiti' (1978). As she told Barry Alpert in a 1976 interview, 'I never found that simple collage was an answer, because it has to go through me to mean anything.' -- (Chris Kraus writing for the introduction of the 'Blood and Guts in High School' fortieth anniversary edition published in 2017.)

Completed in 1978 and first published in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School remains Acker's most popular and best-selling book.

First edition, published by Grove, New York City (1984).