I Love Dick

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.

“"Unexpectedly riveting." BookForum”

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.

There is no time like the present. Is it also true that there is no time but the present? According to presentism, the present time is special in the most fundamental sense because all of reality is included in it. What is past is no longer; what is future is yet to be. This philosophy of time, with roots as far back as Saint Augustine and beyond, is the focus of vigorous and widespread discussion in contemporary philosophy. Presentism: Essential Readings brings together for the first time the seminal works by both presentists and their opponents. Works by Augustine, McTaggart, Prior, Craig and others, address a wide array of issues concerning presentism. How can time pass if everything is present? Is there no future to come to the present; nor a past to receive the present? How can there be truths about the past? Generally a statement is true because of events in reality. But if presentism is correct, then the past would seem to lack a basis in reality. If only the present is real, how can things last? To persist seems to require that something exist at more than one time, but presentism holds that there is only one time: the present. The collected essays on presentism address these and other aspects of the debate--a debate that is just beginning. With explanatory introductions written by the editors, Presentism: Essential Essays will fascinate and stretch the minds of both scholars and novices alike.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.