{"title":"Books by Chris Kraus","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781509879083","title":"The Bastard Factory","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eChris Kraus’ \u003ci\u003eThe Bastard Factory \u003c\/i\u003etells 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHubert 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTranslated from the German by Ruth Martin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685948793205,"sku":"9781509879106","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509879106.jpg?v=1792599204"},{"product_id":"9781781256480","title":"I Love Dick","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204944527538,"sku":"9781781256480","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781256480_c4b78450-ca47-492a-bb8d-d548c65c90ec.jpg?v=1786025429"},{"product_id":"9781788160070","title":"Aliens \u0026 Anorexia","description":"It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity \u0026amp; 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 \u0026amp; Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205559386290,"sku":"9781788160070","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781788160070_be468d9d-37b0-4174-a608-cf27583aff59.jpg?v=1786026875"},{"product_id":"9780141986654","title":"After Kathy Acker","description":"\u003cp\u003eRich 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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, \u003ci\u003eAfter Kathy Acker\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225689370997,"sku":"9780141986654","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141986654_aa7f09e1-1551-40d9-9dca-d14683501cbe.jpg?v=1786011138"},{"product_id":"9781619029170","title":"Cool For You","description":"\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301964165493,"sku":"9781619029170","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781619029170_b086d546-f657-47d0-89db-7f8251de530d.jpg?v=1786023528"},{"product_id":"9781781258989","title":"Torpor","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304570958197,"sku":"9781781258989","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781258989_0b8f22de-3b37-40d1-bee0-4134c3c67a63.jpg?v=1786025530"},{"product_id":"9781584350989","title":"Where Art Belongs","description":"\u003cb\u003eChris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eWhere Art Belongs\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to reclaim public space and time, \u003ci\u003eWhere Art Belongs\u003c\/i\u003e describes the trend towards collectivity manifested in the visual art world during the past decade, and the small forms of resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment\/media\/culture industry. For all its faults, Kraus argues, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56305158160757,"sku":"9781584350989","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781584350989_6d291267-f0d2-4206-8d8b-8066cf6ba833.jpg?v=1786023419"},{"product_id":"9781917189255","title":"The Four Spent the Day Together","description":"‘Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel’ The New Yorker‘A writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents’ Colm Tóibín‘This is Chris Kraus’s masterpiece’ Constance DebréOn the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.   At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682671403381,"sku":"9781917189675","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56309000765813,"sku":"9781917189255","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781917189675_5602ce6a-6e6c-456f-9eec-cf890d86d0da.jpg?v=1792511575"},{"product_id":"i-love-dick","title":"I Love Dick","description":"\u003cp\u003e** 30th anniversary edition\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood**Dick inspires me. Dick won't let me in. I want Dick. I can't have Dick. I love Dick. Chris Kraus, an artist still trying to break through at forty, spends an evening with an enigmatic professor named Dick and falls madly, inexplicably in love. Enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit, she crafts a series of letters and encounters designed to lure him in - or push him away. Ripping up the rules on fiction, essay or art intervention, I Love Dick is widely considered to be the most influential feminist novel of the past three decades. Beloved of fans including Lena Dunham, Sheila Heti, Kim Gordon, bell hooks, Tavi Gevinson and Alexa Chung, in its thirtieth anniversary edition it remains as fierce, funny, inventive and relevant as ever. 'A joyful riposte to all those stories in which clever women fall victim to the pressures of convention' GUARDIAN\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57507749626229,"sku":"9781806490943","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781806490943.jpg?v=1791213855"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-chris-kraus.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}