Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you. In I LOVE DICK, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & 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.

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.