Promotional Information

From Critical Theory California, Chris Kraus now moves closer to the diseased heart of the USA: dried-out, drugged-out, paranoid New Mexico. Reading this book is like watching a car crash happen in slow motion. Very few writers are as intelligent and honest as Kraus -- and no one sees so clearly. -- Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men Chris Kraus cuts a new and insatiably clever line in this explosive new work, breaking down big themes like art writing, romance, and capitalism, within a wildly expansive take on the thriller. -- Janine Armin, Joyland Summer of Hate is as disturbing, powerful and original as anything I've read in recent years, creating an existential noir out of the American landscape, the Southwest, the industrial prison system. A writer, in hiding from her would-be killer, cobbles together a community of misfits. A recovering addict is out of jail and seeking redemption, though everywhere he turns he finds traps. Avert your eyes if you don't like the truth. Freedom -- both personal and political--is revealed as painfully illusive in this gripping novel. -- Danzy Senna, author of You Are Free: Stories Chris Kraus is one of our smartest and most original writers on art and culture. -- Holland Cotte New York Times

About the Author

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker- A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

For readers tired of political art's worn-out strategies, Summer of Hate joins the rest of Kraus' bibliography in offering an engaging and razor-sharp alternative.—Meagan Day, Full-stop.net

Summer of Hate is original, intelligent, darkly humorous, emotionally honest, and it grips the reader with a relentless thriller-like force.—Victoria Patterson, Los Angeles Review of Books

When writers like Kraus commit to a subjective stance—biographical or not—they become easy targets for critics quick to dismiss the work as indulgent, aggressive, or victimizing. Summer of Hate is commendable for not only taking up the mantle of sexualized female subjectivity, but for its narrative of exploration the real psychic underbelly of the elite art world: the experience of the disenfranchised and the incarcerated, and the limits of a social system that imposes ever greater disparities between classes.—Brooklyn Rail