SOURCE: "Breaking to Build," in Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 1997, p. 24.

In the following review, Adil offers favorable assessments of Eurydice in the Underworld and Bodies of Work.

To observe that Kathy Acker's writing refuses to seduce is not to denigrate her work. There is method in her madness; her hysteria is an aesthetic strategy. Her fiction is difficult, driven by an ethical fervour that denies us the pleasures of naturalism and narrative. The reader is so often shouted at that it is easy to become deaf to the sophistication and technical virtuosity with which Acker composes her symphonies of screams. The simultaneous publication of her essays and stories is an opportunity to listen, to reappraise a misunderstood writer.

When Eurydice in the Underworld, a collection of Acker's short fictions written between 1981 and 1997, is read in conjunction with the essays and articles in Bodies of Work, it is easier...