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.

After Kathy Acker: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Kraus, Chris

Arts & Literature

Penguin Books, Ltd.

BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering.

Semiotext[e]

This bilingual publication offers an unprecedented exploration of the work of Belgian poet and artist Sophie Podolski (1953–1974), who has lingered in obscurity since her untimely death at the age of 21. Podolski’s work is emblematic of a time marked by sexual liberation, antipsychiatry, and youth disenchantment. As a self-taught writer and artist, she wrote in an uninhibited and provocative style about life, popular culture, and conformist society. While she was known primarily as a poet during her lifetime, this book places emphasis on Podolski’s visual practice and highly personal iconography. As well as the original manuscript of her only book, The Country Where Everything Is Permitted (1972), this book showcases Podolski’s remarkable body of graphic works, with more than 100 drawings and some of her earliest etchings.  

Sophie Podolski: Le pays où tout est permis/The Country Where Everything Is Permitted (English and French Edition)

Arts & Photography

Larsen, Lars Bang

Convert, Jean-Philippe

Thys, Erik

Podolski, Sophie

History & Criticism

Mercatorfonds

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Limited Edition. In this special series of eight perfect-bound books, each book is an anthology and a conversation between the guest curator and the elder(s) she hosts. In ELDERS SERIES #3, Tisa Bryant hosts Chris Kraus.Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. 2009 marked the tenth anniversary of their mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary ELDERS SERIES is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.

Elders Series #3 (The Belladonna Elders Series, 2009, 3)

Literature & Fiction

Bryant, Tisa

Poetry

Belladonna*

The Bastard Factory

Literary

Picador USA

I Love Dick

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 the world and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

BRILLIANCE AUDIO ^

Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you. In I LOVE DICK, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens &amp; Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, opened up an entirely new era in the history of writing by boldly tearing away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expressions. No wonder it instantly elicited violent controversies and also 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 (a colleague of her husband) refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife begin to write a series of letters to one another instead -- detailing the imaginary fling the wife wishes to have with her husband's colleague. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman not only across the American continent and away from her husband, but also far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. Breaking through into honesty whatever the consequences, Kraus paradoxically becomes a-personal and heroic, almost prophetic in its embrace of the world outside. 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 itself and for all the injustice in world. It is the kind of book that you can't put down before you finish reading it all and turns you into another person, just like the writer herself. Between 9:30 aand 11:30 I tried your number four more times but hung up on your machine. At 1:45 a.m. I tried again, your line was busy. At 2:05 I called again and finally reached you. At first your voice was cold, detached. You said you couldn't really talk, but then you did, you did.

I Love Dick (Native Agents)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Semiotext

As the rope was tightening around my neck, an Alien made love to me. Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here is what happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenz at razor pitch, Aliens &amp; Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel 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&amp;M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity &amp; Grace, her own low-budget independent film.In Aliens &amp; Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem." Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food.

Aliens & Anorexia (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Genre Fiction

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay it right beside the other time, the time of horror, Bad History could just recede into the distance without ever having to be resolved.--from TorporSet at the dawn of the New World Order, Chris Kraus's third novel, Torpor loops back to the beginning of the decade that was the basis of I Love Dick, her pseudo-confessional cult-classic debut. It's summer, 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL. 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 specious aim of adopting a Romanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere, and wars are erupting across Yugoslavia.Unhappily married to Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathes academe, Sylvie thinks only of happiness. At 35, she dreams of stuffed bears and wonders why their lives lack the tremulous sincerity that pervades thirtysomething, that season's hot new TV show. There are only two things, Sylvie thinks, that will save them: a child of their own, and the success of The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as they move forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them.Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torpor explores the swirling mix of nationalisms, capital flows and negative entropy that define the present, haunted by the persistence of historical memory. Written in the third person, it is her most personal novel to date.

Torpor (Native Agents)

United States

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kraus, Chris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kraus, Chris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kraus, Chris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

After Kathy Acker: A Biography

After Kathy Acker: A Biography

Sophie Podolski: Le pays où tout est permis/The Country Where Everything Is Permitted (English and French Edition)

Elders Series #3 (The Belladonna Elders Series, 2009, 3)

The Bastard Factory

I Love Dick

I Love Dick (Native Agents)

Aliens & Anorexia (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

Torpor (Native Agents)