Kathy Acker. 
 
Grove Press: 1988. Stated first edition, though the number line runs from 10 to 2. Hardcover in a jacket.Octavo. A couple of smudges on the jacket and a fold across the top of the back panel. Corners bumped. Top corner of the front board scuffed. Soiling on the back board. A few smudges on the fore edge of the text block. 227 pages. Very good. 
 
Think post mortem instead of post modern, and literary mad scientist Acker is in the lab. Set in a future, smoldering Paris overrun by Algerian revolutionaries flying the banner of the Third World, Empire follows lovers and rebels Thivai and Abhor, a wannabe pirate and suicide-haunted cyborg. The Grove edition of the book is rarer than the British first edition. 
 
"An elegy for the world of the fathers."