KATHY ACKER — Pussycat Fever, AK Press, 1995

By 1995 Kathy Acker’s novels were published by Grove Press in New York and by Pandora and Serpent’s Tail in London. Pussycat Fever came out through a different channel. AK Press started in Stirling in 1987 as an anarchist mail-order distributor and grew into a publisher run as a collective, with no bosses. Acker’s text reached readers through the same catalogues that sold Hakim Bey and the Situationists.

The two artists in the book came from that world too. Diane DiMassa self-published Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist from 1991 to 1996, a comic about a queer woman’s rage at the street. Freddie Baer (1952–2025) had been cutting collages since 1981 for anarchist papers and presses: Autonomedia’s cover for Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (1991), AK Press’s own titles, and Ecstatic Incisions (1992), a collection of her work AK Press published. Their pictures run alongside Acker’s text rather than illustrating it.

Acker credited Sylvère Lotringer, the editor of Semiotext(e), with introducing her to Deleuze and Guattari. Their work, she said in 1991, gave her “a language for what I was doing.” Semiotext(e) published her Hannibal Lecter, My Father the same year. Pussycat Fever shows where that thinking also travelled: off the theory shelf and into the comics, zines and mail-order lists of the anarchist press.

The text is short and non-linear: Pussycat and an unnamed narrator move through sex, danger and dream-like rooms. The hot-pink cover lays out its terms before the first page. The book appeared a year before Grove published Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996).