Book excerpt: A collection of three novels from the experimental feminist writer: “Literal Madness is Acker at her most powerful, disturbing, and provocative.” —Catherine Texier, author of Victorine Kathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, “speaks to us out of a delightful mock-naivete that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, [it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined” (Los Angeles Times). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bronté sisters—is a “scathing commentary on false values in art” (The Hartford Courant). In the haunting Florida, Acker achieves “a nearly telegraphic reduction of the Bogart-Bacall movie Key Largo to fatalistic, tough-guy essentials” (Booklist). “There’s a haunting method to Acker’s ‘madness’: a rough, raw, erudite wail against the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion.” —Kirkus Reviews