{"product_id":"close-writing-kathy-acker-cookie-mueller-and-love-in-pieces-hardback-9781478029786","title":"Close Writing; Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces (Hardback) 9781478029786","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eClose Writing\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eKathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eAlice Butler (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9781478029786\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eHardback, published 30 June 2026\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e304 pages, 34 illustrations, including 16 in color\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.572 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e“\u003ci\u003eClose Writing\u003c\/i\u003e is a book as much about Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller as it is about the process of writing towards them. This allows a self-reflexive, painfully close analysis of what it is to pursue the objects of one’s critical affection, fanaticism, or love. Alice Butler is an excellent, compelling, and challenging writer. There’s magic here, in the precision and clarity, and in the imaginative entrance into her subjects’ writings and lives.”—Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Queen Mary University of London\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eClose Writing\u003c\/i\u003e is a unique feminist experiment in critical and creative art writing. Combining theoretical insights, deep archival research, and close visual as well as textual analysis, Butler enacts the intimate, performative practice of ‘close writing’ through the traces Acker and Mueller left behind—texts, garments, photographs. This book reimagines reading and writing as acts of affection, resistance, love and proximity across time, loss, love, and feminist desire.”—Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eClose Writing\u003c\/i\u003e, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved,\" reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eAcknowledgments  vii\u003cbr\u003e Prologue. Beloved, So Bittersweet  xi\u003cbr\u003e Introduction. A Writer’\u003cbr\u003es Love  1\u003cbr\u003e 1. The Diary Piece: The Line, The Cut, the Blur of Two Lives, or Kathy Acker’\u003cbr\u003es Bad Sex Blur  41\u003cbr\u003e 2. The Novel-in-Pieces: “\u003cbr\u003eLike Little Birds Testing Their Wings,”\u003cbr\u003e or Cookie Mueller’\u003cbr\u003es Adolescent Reverie  83\u003cbr\u003e 3. The Letter Piece: Around Valentine’\u003cbr\u003es Day, 1980, or, Lovesick Perversions in Correspondence  139\u003cbr\u003e Postscript. Open Envelopes, or, I Am Still Stung  197\u003cbr\u003e Notes  205\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography  247\u003cbr\u003e Index  265\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52591026569496,"sku":"9781478029786","price":74.59,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/close-writing-kathy-acker-cookie-mueller-and-love-in-pieces-hardback-9781478029786","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}