Chris Kraus

  • print Feb/Mar 2017

    True Grit

    IN THINKING ABOUT a book to recommend now, I shy away from anything programmatic, because endless punditry is part of what brought us here. But one template for understanding our current situation is Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (2010). Writing in December of 2009, a year when the number of murders in the city exceeded 2,400, Bowden offers a poetic, brutal description of the centerless violence that has gripped Juárez since December 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderón declared a "war on drugs," to be led by the Mexican army.

    At

  • interviews March 23, 2016

    Bookforum talks with Joni Murphy

    Joni Murphy’s debut novel, Double Teenage, ends with the words, “This is a spell for getting out of girlhood alive,” but it speaks equally well to anyone alert to the ways in which a culture of violence can inflect all aspects of life. Growing up in the American Southwest during the 1990s, Murphy’s two upper-middle-class protagonists are stunned by the murder of Donna Beth, their sometime-babysitter and role model. As they get older, they begin to see that the violence around them is systemic, extending to the routine killings of the narco wars and the way these horrors are normalized until they are reduced to ambient noise.

    Joni Murphy’s debut novel, Double Teenage, ends with the words, “This is a spell for getting out of girlhood alive,” but it speaks equally well to anyone alert to the ways in which a culture of violence can inflect all aspects of life. Growing up in the American Southwest during the 1990s, Murphy’s two upper-middle-class protagonists are stunned by the murder of Donna Beth, their sometime-babysitter and role model. As they get older, they begin to see that the violence around them is systemic, extending to the routine killings of the narco wars and the way these horrors are normalized until

  • print Dec/Jan 2015

    Underknown Pleasures

    STORIES THAT MAKE YOU FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE

    LYDIA DAVIS

    For many years now, I have admired Lucia Berlin’s stories out loud to people, but almost no one has known her name or her work. This has been an abiding mystery to me. Is it geographical—the places she lived, wrote about (Alaska, Chile, Colorado)? Or is it her difficult subjects—alcoholism, poverty, abandonment, cruelty? But she also wrote about love, generosity, loyalty, courage, and many other good things. And she was always funny. As one of her narrators says, “I don’t mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny.”

    She

  • culture June 06, 2011

    It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image + Text Work by Women Artists & Writers edited by Lisa Pearson

    The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes "the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that," namely, "what familiar taxonomies cannot order." Hak Kyung Cha’s piece—composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides—points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson’s penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories