KATHY ACKER — Literal Madness: Three Novels, Grove Press, New York, 1988

First combined edition, published by Grove Press, New York, 1988. Hardcover in illustrated dust jacket; jacket design and illustration by George Corsillo; author photograph by Kate Simon. 410 pages. ISBN 0-8021-0001-5.

Contains: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida.

Condition: good, visibly handled; rubbing, scratching and creasing to the dust jacket, with edge wear, small chips and softened corners. Small label retained on the rear jacket. The jacket remains substantially complete; boards and interior condition not confirmed from the photographs.

This is the 1988 Grove Press hardcover, not the later Evergreen paperback — and more precisely the first combined edition of the three texts. Kathy Goes to Haiti originally appeared in 1978, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1984, while Florida received its first book publication here.

Bringing the works together reveals three different forms of reuse. Travel writing, literary biography and film noir become unstable structures through which Acker writes sexuality, political power and identity. In Florida, John Huston’s Key Largo is compressed into something closer to a script, transcription and residue; Pasolini returns as the author and investigator of his own death.

The collection also records Acker’s movement into a broader American publishing system. Previously dispersed texts are consolidated into a substantial Grove hardcover, given a unified commercial design and redistributed as a single body of work.

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