Our Book of the Week this week is Aliens and Anorexia by Chris Kraus. Following I Love Dick and Torpor , Aliens and Anorexia completes Kraus's trilogy of detonations under the wall that lies between fiction and memoir. Aliens and Anorexia 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 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. 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.

>> Read Thomas's review of I Love Dick.

>> "I'm just a channel for all that shit."

>> What is this 'female consciousness'?

>> Changing lives. 

>> I Love Dick 'became' a television series. 

>> Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist'.