I Love Dick

A clever, finely crafted crossover between life, love and cultural studies. -- Peter Beilharz The Australian But my favorite example of the genre is from nearly 20 years ago, and it's by a woman. Chris Kraus's "I Love Dick" offers the story of a woman named Chris Kraus -- also an experimental filmmaker, just like the author -- reckoning with her unrequited love for "Dick ____," a cultural critic with whom she becomes obsessed. The narrative is an exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy ("I think desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy -- a claustrophobia inside your skin") and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act. -- Leslie Jamison The New York Times A little masterpiece of late twenieth century literature. East Hampton Star Devastatingly funny and sublime... a new classic. The Seattle Stranger Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating, and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page... 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. -- Rick Moody Post Road Tart, brazen and funny... a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behavior, power, control. The Nation The biggest art revelation of the year. The New Zealand Listener Unexpectedly riveting. BookForum

Chris Kraus is the author of the novels Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Summer of Hate as well as Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs, all published by Semiotext(e). A Professor of Writing at the European Graduate School, she writes for various magazines and lives in Los Angeles. Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine "the rock star of modern poetry," is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.