Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

“ I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the ‘subversive utopia’ that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for”

“An exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act. Kraus is interested in the dynamics of exposure itself: why we judge acts of self-exposure as self-absorbed or needy, especially if they come from a woman; how any trace of the self can become a kind of shameful stink, the whiff of some failure of imagination or, worse yet, self-pity or self-aggrandizement”

“Chris Kraus’ first novel, I Love Dick , reads like Madame Bovary as if Emma had written it. Kraus spins out the Emma-syndrome of dissatisfied feminine boredom through a chronicle of the ’80s art world. Her book is a damningly intelligent form of ‘confessional’ literature, part love letter and part public document”

“Reading I Love Dick made me laugh—cry—but most importantly it made me think about all the important issues of our time, DESIRE, AGING—Dick is a mere backdrop for this provocative meditation—it’s edgy and deep”

“Tart, brazen and funny… a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behavior, power, control”

“ I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind”

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Where Art Belongs

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Tuskar Rock Press,

an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

First published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA

Copyright © 1997, 2006 by Chris Kraus

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 254 6