Acker's Literal Madness brings together Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984) and Florida (1987), each taking a different approach to the relationship between personal experience, cultural mythology and the production of the self.

In Kathy Goes to Haiti, Acker constructs a fractured account of sexual encounters, tourism and power and the interplay of autobiography and invention. My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini draws upon the murdered Italian filmmaker to investigate desire, violence and the instability of identity through a shifting arrangement of voices and borrowed narratives. Florida reworks the mythology of Hollywood and American popular culture, incorporating figures and fragments from existing texts into an examination of sexuality, fantasy and social control.

Acker's work refuses the distinction between original and borrowed language, treating literature as material to be taken apart, rearranged and made to speak against itself. These three novels offer an entry into her confrontational, formally experimental approach to fiction.

Edition / Condition: Grove Press / Grove Atlantic paperback edition. Three novels in one volume. Good condition, with minor cover and edge wear.