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PM / TVRT Press

Kathy Acker — The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

Kathy Acker — The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

Publisher
PM / TVRT Press
Place & year
New York, 1978
Type
Artist Book
Format
Softcover, 152 pp., first paperback edition
Size
11.5 × 16.5 cm
Condition
Good vintage condition: light rubbing, edge wear, corner softening, and age toning consistent with handling and storage.
Register
TNR-2026-0224 · 16 June 2026
Regular price £160
Regular price Sale price £160
Sale Placed
Register No. TNR-2026-0224
Registered 16 June 2026
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Quantity

Shipping: UK £7, free over £50 · Europe £18 · US & Canada £25 · Rest of world £30.
Duties and import taxes may apply outside the UK.

Notes

A small green paperback from the moment Kathy Acker's literary project was becoming visible. Published before her wider institutional recognition, the book introduces many of the procedures that would define her practice: borrowed identities, unstable authorship, repetition, confession, and theft as method.

The title circulates through the voices of historical female criminals and outsiders. Biography becomes fiction. Fiction becomes quotation. The author appears less as origin than as editor, transmitter, and host.

Produced within the infrastructure of late-1970s independent publishing, the book survives as both literary object and document of a particular distribution network: small presses, alternative bookstores, artist communities, and informal exchange. Its scale remains modest. Its influence does not.

A copy retained from circulation. A paperback that records the moment experimental writing, punk culture, feminism, and appropriation began occupying the same space.

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