RaveThe New Left ReviewTo spotlight oneself takes ambition – it takes rather more to immolate one’s self. Thanks to Jason McBride’s definitive new biography, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, we now have in our hands an account of the genesis of Acker’s ambition and the work it sparked ... One of the dangers of biography as a genre is it can render its subject banal – it turns out Great Writers wipe their asses like everyone else. In puncturing the image Acker crafted for spectacular consumption, McBride gives us something more: a narrative account of the struggle of one woman to extend and inflect the trajectory of modernist writing in the late twentieth century. Her aim was to divert its course toward the self-dissolving kind of freedom, which among other things might be a freedom not so much against as beyond the reach of patriarchy.
Imogen Binnie
PositiveThe NationIf you have transitioned, you don’t need a transition story. You have your own. What you need are books about how to live your life, after. The standard trans memoir has little to say about that. The story ends before we get to the part where transition makes your body livable and the rest of your life—not ... Not the least remarkable thing about Nevada is that the very thing that the whole narrative structure of trans memoir is meant to resolve is never resolved ... has a subtle grasp on our complicity in our own oppression ... consolidated and offers the trans reader more to think about in terms of ways to move forward through one’s post-transition life ... Binnie had a particularly fine grasp of the possibilities but also the limits of trans culture in the earlier years of this century. It is rather to say that trans lit, if there’s to be such a thing, still has work to do.
Camila Sosa Villada tr. Kit Maude
RaveLIBEREven in translation, there are moments of convulsive beauty in the prose, but this beauty is neither pure nor timeless; it\'s always glinting off the turbulent surface of everyday colonial violence ... a beautiful and unsettling book, both clear-eyed and delirious. It gives a fresh coat of lipstick to some standard images of the night, of sex work-and, like sex work, it is economical. Yet in a handful of pages, Bad Girls gets to the heart of trans joy and trans abjection.
