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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE became an international and a canonical genre with remarkable rapidity. It is, therefore, a remarkable test case through which to explore how a genre becomes privileged and what the cultural effects of its continuing appropriation are. In this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished scholars the particular point of reference is the visual, that is, the myriad ways in which tragic texts are (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through verbal and artistic description. Topics treated include the interaction of comedy and dithyramb with tragedy; vase painting and tragedy; representations of Dionysus, of Tragoedia, and of Nike; Homer, Aeschylus, Philostratus, and Longus; choral lyric and ritual performance, choral victories, and the staging of choruses on the modern stage. The common focus of all the essays is an engagement with and response to the unique scholarly voice of Froma Zeitlin.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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