Fiction. Written in the shadow of Georg Büchner's Lenz at razor pitch, ALIENS & ANOREXIA, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," her virtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film. In ALIENS & ANOREXIA, Kraus argues 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 this culture hands us through its food.

Author City: LOS ANGELES, CA USA

Chris Kraus is the author of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and the novels ALIENS & ANOREXIA, I Love Dick, and Torpor. The 2007 recipient of the Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a 2010 Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's grant, she has taught art writing in graduate programs at University of California, Irvine, Art Center College, San Francisco Art Institute, and European Graduate School.