Search results for ""Author Chris Kraus""

When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy. Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.

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It's Summer, 1991, the dawning of the New World Order; a post-MTV, pre-AOL generation. Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment, set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the intention of adopting a Romanian orphan. Unflinchingly dark, hilarious and moving - Torpor is at once a satire and philosophy of cultural history, social identity and failing relationships. Dipping into the trajectory of a life at different moments, Kraus interrogates convention and emotion, creating characters that are flawed, witty, and altogether true to life. Part prequel, part sequel, Torpor continues a project of life-writing; personal, unsparing, and triumphant. If I Love Dick is the book of your 20s, Torpor is the book of your 30s.

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The first authorized biography of postmodernism's literary hero, Kathy Acker.Acker's life was a fable; and to describe the confusion and love and conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the late twentieth century. It is girls from which stories begin, she wrote in her last notebook. And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through means both within and beyond her control.—from After Kathy AckerRich 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.

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Chris Kraus’ The Bastard Factory tells the story of an entire epoch: a drama of betrayal and self-delusion spanning the years 1905 to 1975, taking us from Riga to Moscow, Berlin and Munich all the way to Tel Aviv.Hubert and Konstantin Solm are brothers, born in Riga at the beginning of the twentieth century. They will find themselves – along with their Jewish adopted sister, Ev Solm – caught up in in the maelstrom of their changing times.As the two brothers climb the rungs of society – working first for the government in Nazi Germany, then as agents for the Allied Forces, and eventually becoming spies for the young West Germany – Ev will be their constant companion, and eventually a lover to them both. The passionate love triangle that emerges will propel the characters to terrifying moral and political depths.The story of the Solms is also the story of twentieth-century Germany: the decline of an old world and the rise of a new one – under new auspices but with the same familiar protagonists.Translated from the German by Ruth Martin

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It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths' ... It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a 'radical philosophy of sadness' and 'immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical' ... It's the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for her s/m partner to reply to her emails ... It's 1943, and Simone Weil is in London, completing her project of transcendence by dying of starvation ... Filled with Chris Kraus' trademark wit and frankness, unfolding to reveal the lives of ecstatic visionaries and failed artists, Aliens & Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.

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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. In this first, fully authorized biography, 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 20th century's most significant artistic enterprises.

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Chris Kraus’ The Bastard Factory tells the story of an entire epoch: a drama of betrayal and self-delusion spanning the years 1905 to 1975, taking us from Riga and Moscow, Berlin and Munich, all the way to Tel Aviv.Hubert and Konstantin Solm are brothers, born in Riga at the beginning of the twentieth century. They will find themselves – along with their Jewish adopted sister, Ev Solm – caught up in in the maelstrom of their changing times.As the two brothers climb the rungs of society – working first for the government in Nazi Germany, then as agents for the Allied forces, and eventually becoming spies for the young West Germany – Ev will be their constant companion, and eventually a lover to them both. The passionate love triangle that emerges will propel the characters to terrifying moral and political depths.The story of the Solms is also the story of twentieth-century Germany: the decline of an old world and the rise of a new one – under new auspices but with the same familiar protagonists.Translated from the German by Ruth Martin

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Artist Jane Dickson is a deep-rooted and central voice in New York City's complex creative history. In the late 1970s and early '80s, she was part of the movement joining the legacies of downtown art, punk rock, and hip hop through her involvement with the Colab art collective, the Fashion Moda gallery, and legendary exhibitions including the Real Estate Show and Times Square Show. In the midst of this groundbreaking work, Dickson lived, worked and raised two children in an apartment on 43rd Street and 8th Avenue at a time when the neighborhood was at its most infamous, crime-ridden, and spectacularly seedy. Through it all, Jane photographed, drew and painted extraordinary scenes of life in Times Square. These works, many of which are reproduced here for the first time, include candid documentary snapshots, roughly vibrant charcoal sketches, and paintings created on surfaces ranging from sandpaper to Brillo pads. Featuring a foreword by Chris Kraus and afterword by Fab Five Freddy, Jane Dickson in Times Square is a time machine back to a New York City that was truly wild: lawless, manic, sometimes squalid, sometimes magnificent.

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