I’m happy to announce the publication of I’m Very Into You, the correspondence of Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, edited and with an introduction by me.
After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails are a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. Their letters shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace—by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching.
Much thanks to Hedi El Kholti and Chris Kraus of Semiotext(e), as well as Lidia Yuknavitch of the much-missed Chiasmus Press.
Reviews are to be found at: Bookforum, The Guardian, Hairpin, VICE (“weird, sexy, touching”) , Full Stop, Salon, Slate, and Electric Literature. Here’s an excerpt in Bomb.