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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
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
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.
A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon
its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the
book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of
post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her
birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive
work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight--with a new
introduction by Chris Kraus--continues to become more relevant than
ever before. In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey
lives with Johnny--her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money,
amusement, and father"--until he leaves her for another woman.
Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld
of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees
to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid
affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual,
and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic
and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.
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.
Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws
light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations.
Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the
Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical
manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than
the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised
revolutionaries (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped
to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their
message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In
a media society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication
merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last
outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of
the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the
masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media
society, all the masses can do-and all they will do-is enjoy the
spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its
ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe
after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary
illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent
anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just
the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.
Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French
theory and new American fiction. Compiled in 2001 to commemorate
the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together
highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works.
Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American
thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as
a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the
mission of melding French theory with the American art world and
punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents
and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and
writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan,
Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William
S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In
Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these
people together in the same volume for the first time.
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I Love Dick (Paperback)
Chris Kraus; Foreword by Eileen Myles
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R416
Discovery Miles 4 160
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
First published in 2000, Aliens & Anorexia defined a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and 'Africa,' Kraus's virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.
In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case 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 that this culture hands us through its food. As Palle Yourgrau writes in the book's new foreword, 'Kraus's rescue operation for aliens like Weil from behind enemy lines on planet Earth is a gift, if, in the end, like all good deeds, it remains-as Weil herself would be the first to insist-a fool's errand.'
Baudrillard meets Breaking Bad in this stark and bleakly hilarious
novel about a descent into an underclass world of born-again
Christianity, self-help, and crack. "In his journal, Paul liked to
make lists: What he ordered from Commissary (shaving cream,
toothpaste, deodorant, the transistor radio he had for a week
before the guards took it away). The books he picked off the cart
(The Bible, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Codependent No More.) What
phone calls he made and received; also, Bible Study certificates,
letters and cards, his workout routines and his moods (Anxious,
Nervous, Trusting in God, but mostly Depressed). Paul has a record
of every push-up he did while he was in prison but he cannot
remember shit about what happened before his arrest." -from Summer
of Hate 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, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered
romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel
reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when
power becomes invisible, or merely banal.
A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading
proponents of the New Narrative movement. Fascination brings
together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a
previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely, by the
poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the
New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author's early
years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy,
drug-ridden world of Long Island's North Shore in the 1970s. It
concludes with Triangles in the Sand, a new, previously unpublished
memoir of Killian's brief affair in the 1970s with the composer
Arthur Russell. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of
the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era-a time
in which Richard Nixon's resignation intersected with David Bowie's
Diamond Dogs-from one of the leading voices in experimental gay
writing of the past thirty years. "Move along the velvet rope,"
Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, "run your shaky fingers
past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: 'You did not live in our
time! Be Sorry!'"
Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village
Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art
scene. In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art
critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now
had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the
windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for
a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass
off in the course of a working week. -from Vile Days From March
1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana
reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days
brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches,
too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's
observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim
toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory,
Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the
art review into a chronicle of life under siege. As a critic,
Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a
startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly
environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to
elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their
early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons
and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to
the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public
art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced
by Bruce Hainley, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track
Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his
generation.
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Vzszhhzz (Paperback)
Jeanne Graff, Chris Kraus
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R420
R337
Discovery Miles 3 370
Save R83 (20%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A novel that captures the glancing intersections of a loose group
of artists and lawyers, restaurateurs, philosophers, wine-makers,
and boxers. Having dinner at the Triennale, Massimiliano is cooking
Pho. He bought the ingredients a few days ago on his way back from
Vietnam. The building was built in 1933, Malou went there as a
child with Jacqueline, the fascist architecture and the name
Triennale remained. A building named "every three years."
Massimiliano was born on December 6th, the same day as Malou...
-from Vzszhhzz Composed between destinations, in airplanes, trains,
museums, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff's Vzszhhzz
captures the slight intersections of a loose group of artists and
lawyers, restauranteurs, philosophers, wine-makers and boxers whose
lives are conducted almost entirely in a second language. A loose
chronicle masquerading as a novel, Vszhhzz-like Michele Bernstein's
All The King's Horses, the Bernadette Corporation's Reena
Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg's Surveys-couches Graff's sharp
observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too
much, Vzszhhzz says everything about the relation to time, cities,
weather and smog that has become the lingua franca of a creative
and transient life. "There's an art of writing amidst the energies
and languages of others, and Graff's ear for existential
specificity finds momentum in even the most glancing encounters.
Always on the move, Graff's phototropic texts incline toward human
heat, hallucinating characters upon contact." -John Kelsey
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Dusty Pink (Paperback)
Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Jeffrey Zuckerman, Chris Kraus
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R424
R342
Discovery Miles 3 420
Save R82 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that
captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous
Paris finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these
at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the
cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot -from
Dusty Pink Written with the hope of achieving a "dreary distant
banality," Jean-Jacques Schuhl's first novel is a subjective stroll
through an underground, glamorous Paris, a city that slips into the
background but never disappears, hovering on the verge of its own
suppression. An elegiac and luminous cut-up, Dusty Pink brings
together race wire results, editions of France-Soir, the lyrics to
well-known British songs, scripts from famous old films,
pharmaceutical leaflets, fashion ads, and strips and scraps of
culture in which the avant-garde and academicism blur in an
overview of the cultural scene. This world of atmospheres,
portraits, and dazzling associations of ideas creates a plane of
shimmering surfaces. Published in French in 1972, Jean-Jacques
Schuhl's Dusty Pink became a cult classic. This is its first
translation.
Eileen Myles, the popular author of Chelsea Girls and Not Me, the
poet who ran an openly female campaign for president in 1992, now
gives us a talking masterpiece of a novel that scratches out and
rewrites the picture of what fifty years of female life looks like
today. Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the
downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of
stuttering efforts to leave home. Cool For You's tough girl
narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and
takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs,
and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth
about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of
the family and the State.
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.
A novel in essays that locates a "romance" within the mesh of
electronic communication.So I didn't call you: instead I posted a
new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have
learned: an image, any image, is a blind. All avatars give
different information, illusions of contact called Telepresence,
none of them the real thing. You texted me, 3 am, from some station
... As though it made any difference. But it did. -from Break.up In
this "novel in essays," Joanna Walsh simultaneously flees and
pursues an ambiguous partner in an affair conducted mostly online.
Traversing Europe, she awaits emails and texts and PMs, awash in
her dreams, offering succinct meditations on connection and
communication. If Marguerite Duras situated the telephone as the
twentieth century's preferred hopeless form of connection, Walsh
pinpoints the nodal points of a "romance" within today's mesh of
electronic communication. As Deborah Levy observed recently,
"Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers."
Her 2015 book Hotel, an investigation of transience conducted
through hotel reviews, was described by The Paris Review as "a
slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desires. [Walsh is] funny
throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage
and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish places."
Praise for Joanna Walsh "Walsh's writing has intellectual rigor and
bags of formal bravery." -The Financial Times "Hotel feels like
something you want to endlessly quote: sharp, knowing, casually
erudite ... there is power and an affecting gravitas in what Walsh
does with detail." -Sydney Review of Books "Walsh is a sublimely
elegant writer ... artful and intelligent." -The New Statesman
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 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. Chronicling the sometimes doomed
but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to
reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs 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.
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Now the Night Begins (Hardcover)
Alain Guiraudie, Bruce Hainley, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jeffrey Zuckerman, Chris Kraus
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R714
R582
Discovery Miles 5 820
Save R132 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A novel that is a meditation on friendship, love, obsession, power,
and abuse, by turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, recalling the
work of Sade and Bataille. And he leaves. I'm not happy, I'm pretty
upset at myself, I wasn't satisfied with him but I wouldn't have
been any better without him. I sit on the couch and think. I'm not
actually thinking, it's already been thought, I have to call
Grampa... I need to hear his voice. I miss him. -from Now the Night
Begins At the tail end of summer vacation, Gilles Heurtebise drifts
between lazy afternoons, swimming, cruising the shores of a nearby
lake, and absentmindedly hooking up with old lovers. He has yet to
achieve material or romantic stability. He is forty, facing a
precarious future with unformed fears and regrets. The one thing
that seems solid is Grampa, the ninety-year-old patriarch of a
family Gilles has befriended. Gilles grows obsessed by the old man,
and a strange sexual bond grows between the two. When the police
get involved, and Gilles is witness to a murder, the banality of
interhuman violence is brought to a paroxysmal climax. The winner
of France's prestigious Prix Sade, Now the Night Begins is a
meditation on friendship, love, power, and abuse in a world where
social relations have radically disintegrated. Interwoven with
swaths of Occitan, the language of troubadours and love, and by
turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, the novel recalls Georges
Bataille's dark surrealism and the unvarnished violence of Bret
Easton Ellis. It proves Alain Guiraudie's status as the preeminent
writer of the vulnerability underlying our contemporary malaise.
"The genial perversity of Alain Guiraudie's Now the Night Begins is
something rare and fascinatingly energized, a metaphysical and
moral slapstick that points to the arbitrariness of all authority
and the fluidity of all desires. In its way, the most elegant,
certainly the most hilarious brief for anarchy that anyone has
written in a long time." -Gary Indiana "Raw, sexual, and
scatological, Alain Guiraudie's novel evokes Sade and Bataille."
-Elisabeth Philippe
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Kusama (Hardcover)
Louise Neri, Takaya Goto; Contributions by RoseLee Goldberg, Chris Kraus, Laura Hoptman
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R1,637
R1,294
Discovery Miles 12 940
Save R343 (21%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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This book comes in three different color patterns (all with the
same cover design). The most comprehensive book devoted to the
incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama, now in
her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an
influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in
1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that
forged a new visual vocabulary-the Net paintings, which were
composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large
canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other
extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures
which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973
she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today. Since then,
she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous
pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this
book-created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo
studio-the breadth and import of this watershed artist's career are
considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of
her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes
ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist's extensive
archive that have never been seen before. The publication is timed
to coincide with the artist's major touring retrospective, which
makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in
summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration
with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton. Contributors include:
Leslie Camhi, RoseLeeGoldberg, Laura Hoptman, Chris Kraus, Arthur
Lubow, Kevin McGarry, Louise Neri, Akira Tatehata, and Olivier
Zahm.
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Say So (Hardcover)
Whitney Hubbs; Text written by Chris Kraus
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R1,398
Discovery Miles 13 980
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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