Chris Kraus

A novel set in 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL: Sylvie, longing for a life more like the TV show thirtysomething, sets off with her husband, Columbia University professor Jerome, to Romania to adopt a child.

"Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenz, Aliens and Anorexia defines a female form of chance that is radical and emotional. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using polemical narratives to lead the reader through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and Africa, her virtual S/M partner who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood movie while Kraus is chronicling the failure of her low-budget independent film Gravity and Grace. Arguing for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, Aliens and Anorexia reclaims starvation from the psychoanalytic ghetto."--Publisher's web page.

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband;and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world;and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

"LA Artland is a survey of one of the most vibrant and influential art scenes of recent decades. Having produced world-renowned artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Catherine Opie and Jim Shaw, Los Angeles since the 90s has rivaled New York as the US contemporary art capital. With the continuing success of LA-based art programs at CalArts, Art Center and UCLA, as well as a growing gallery scene stretching from blue-chip to artist-run spaces, Los Angeles as an art center continues to thrive, producing increasingly successful generations of artists. The focus of this publication is on extensive visual documentation of contemporary artists working in Los Angeles now, ranging from well-established international names to emerging talent." "Alongside this visual survey are three essays. Chris Kraus incorporates interviews with artists and gallery owners providing insight into the network of scenes that make up contemporary LA art now. Jan Tumlir (independent art critic) contextualizes contemporary art in Los Angeles, commenting on recent trends and the influence of the LA-based MFA programs. Jane McFadden (art historian currently teaching at Art Center) traces specific trajectories between artists living and working in Los Angeles from the 60s to today, forming a unique history of the area."--BOOK JACKET.

Waking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating "real life." Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes. In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt's help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route. Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul's empathic attempts to save each other's lives seems doomed to dissolve. Summer of Hate is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice."--Amazon.com.

"In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In four interlinked essays, Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book Video Green that 'the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.' Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses such subjects as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix"--Publisher's description.

"Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon...scholar, stripper, victim, and media-whore: the late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible. In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises. Beginning in her mid-teens, Acker lived her ideal of the Great Writer as Cultural Hero, and as Kraus argues, she may well have been the only female writer to succeed in assuming this role. She died of untreated cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana when she was fifty years old, but the real pathos of Acker's life may have been in the fact that by then she'd already outlived her ideal"--Amazon.com.