The official Heathers announcement. (Courtesy Publication Studios)

If the weather reports are to be believed, this is going to be one gorgeous Saturday in New York—a high of about 72, pretty much no chance of rain and just a few clouds in the sky.

It's also shaping up to be a banner day for art books, with at least three major events on tap for May 18, which are listed below.

1. Erin Shirreff is having a book launch to mark the publication of a monograph tied to her shows at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. This is from 2 to 4 p.m. at Ms. Shirreff's New York gallery, Lisa Cooley, at 107 Norfolk Street in Manhattan.

2. A bunch of authors who have released books on the redoubtable imprint Publication Studios will be reading at the redoubtable East Village bar Heathers, at 506 East 13th Street. The authors on tap are David Knowles, Heather Guertin, Sydney S. Kim and Stephen Boyer. I can only vouch for the quality of Ms. Guertin's book, the uproarious and unusual Model Turned Comedian (2013), but I'd bet that the other ones are pretty good too. This is from 6 to 8 p.m., and will be a "fun, boozy, riotous affair," according to organizers.

3. The introduction to this post was a little bit of an exaggeration. You actually don't have to wait until Saturday to enjoy this last one. Primary Information has been posting a number of catalogues online as part of an exhibition/residency at ICA Philadelphia recently. They just loaded on a book by Yves Klein called Peintures from 1954, when the artist was just beginning his brutally short career. It begins with a wordless preface by Pascal Claude. Wild stuff.

Have a great one.

The Supermodel and the Brillo Box is, according to PM, "a gossipy revealing second book about the art world, with fresh material about the Crash of 2008, the rise of China and the Gulf States, buying on the Internet, and new behind-the-scenes stories about artists, dealers and auction houses." (We're going to go out on a limb here and say the supermodel is probably Stephanie Seymour.)

Mr. Thompson is a Toronto-based economist and a professor at that city's Schulich School of Business.

Over his 52 years at The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins has managed to establish a system for his artist profiles that renders his subject, no matter how radical the artist may seem, straight and with clear angles. The result is always masterful, but a new book out next week, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Badlands Unlimited/D.A.P,
110 pp., $16), strips away this prosaic lens and offers the unedited transcripts from the writer’s meetings with Duchamp in 1964, interviews conducted ahead of a major profile in The New Yorker that ran the following year. The book comes out at a perfect time: 2013 is, of course, the centenary of the first readymade, Bicycle Wheel, and the debut of Nude Descending a Staircase at the inaugural Armory Show in New York.

“There’s no denying that Duchamp is an icon,” said the artist Paul Chan, Badlands’s founder and publisher. “But I think one of the easiest ways not to think about a person is to turn them into an icon, because someone who’s iconic, we think we know all about that person. It’s refreshing and bracing to hear Duchampian ideas from the mouth of Duchamp.” The e-book version even comes with audio clips of the artist’s freewheeling, heavily accented answers.

“He had that wonderfully easy manner,” Mr. Tomkins said in an interview about the book. As with any journalist, though, it wasn’t always enjoyable to listen to his old tapes. Mr. Tomkins, whose 1996 book Duchamp is considered the authoritative biography of the artist, said he was a relative rookie then, and now he wishes he’d asked a few crucial questions, like what had happened in the year Duchamp spent alone in Munich, just before 1913. Still, he said, Duchamp “never hesitated to answer anything or talk about anything, and even my questions which I think are sometimes a little less intelligent than they might have been, he had a way of turning them into something interesting.”

Messrs. Chan and Tomkins went through about six hours of tape, which they then edited into a cohesive dialogue. Throughout the interview, the 39-year-old Mr. Tomkins largely stayed out of the way of the 77-year-old Duchamp, whom he’d met five years prior while working for Newsweek. They spoke at his home on West 10th Street, where Duchamp spent most of his days playing chess, having supposedly retired from the world of art. The New Yorker profile slightly underrates the extent to which Duchamp was still an artist at that point, simply because the piece strove to tell a more comprehensive story. We now know that he was in fact still making art—a major installation, Etant donnés, was shown posthumously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969 (it’s installed at the museum today as part of its permanent collection)—and in the transcript, it’s clear that the contemporary situation was on his mind. He speaks about the modern age almost as much as he speaks about his own life, and he proposes theories on where art is headed, with praise for Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and some elements of Pop Art.

With the exception of touchstones like those, much of the dialogue reads as though it might have been spoken yesterday. His thoughts on the market are particularly prescient. Collectors, he notes, are “parasites” on the “beautiful flower” that is the artist, and they always pay “either too little or too much—which is good in both instances.”

“It’s very pleasant in a way, because there is the possibility to make a living,” he adds in another quote that didn’t make it into The New Yorker. “But the state is very detrimental to the quality of the work done.”

The book presents this prototypical artist in his purest format, which seems consistent with Duchamp’s ethos. As Mr. Tomkins notes in the beginning of his New Yorker piece, Duchamp at that time began to think of the artist as a “mediumistic being,” someone external to whatever experience a viewer might call art. “The poor Mona Lisa is gone,” says the man who once complimented her non-visible hindquarters, “because no matter how wonderful her smile may be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared. I believe that when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing by looking alone.”

Duchamp was no recluse, but it’s hard not to see a parallel to his own existence. He was never prolific, so in his own time everything he did was viewed as a clue to the riddles he hid in his work. In the New Yorker profile, Mr. Tomkins notes that Duchamp once opened a dye business, and one “young Duchamp disciple” saw in this “a conscious play on words between ‘teindre’ (‘to dye’) and ‘peindre’ (‘to paint’)—a discovery that Duchamp regards as entertaining proof that in this sort of scholarship anything goes.” There exists to this day a pet theory that the readymades were not in fact found objects but made by Duchamp himself. What that might mean for his oeuvre is anyone’s guess.

“I’ve never quite understood it myself,” Mr. Tomkins said of such theories. “Because I always found him so open and comfortable with himself and so unsecret. He didn’t obfuscate. He was open and available and intelligent.”

Duchamp understood that art has a shelf life regardless of whoever’s looking at it, and that was one part of his life that was consistent with his practice. In the introduction to the new book, Messrs. Chan and Tomkins compare Duchamp to Michel de Montaigne in his dedication to privacy, freedom and mutability.

“He was not afraid to explore and change,” Mr. Chan said. He knows something about that himself, having semi-retired from art-making, as Duchamp did (though Mr. Chan contributed to Documenta last summer).

Above all else, Duchamp was out to do something new, and as the transcript makes clear, he understood that this wasn’t simple. Moving past the concept that art had to be made by the artist was in some ways the easy part. In works like Nude, Duchamp was trying to capture the “fourth dimension”—which he didn’t think was time, much as that subject did interest him. He was trying to capture the idea that “when I hold a knife, a small knife, I get a feeling from all sides at once.” During sex, he said, people feel every aspect of a partner. For an artist who had already made strides toward the post-medium with his readymades, this fourth dimension concept almost reduces painting to technical support.

Perhaps that’s overreaching, though Mr. Tomkins says he also wishes he’d asked him more about the fourth dimension. There’s still much to study about Duchamp, he said, since his legacy is so widespread.

“He broke down the limitations on art, the boundaries, and it seems to me that this has today become a kind of an article of faith on the part of younger artists,” Mr. Tomkins said. “That they are not constrained by any traditions, that they have to defend their own way completely and that they’re no good unless they do. He’s not the only one, but I think he was one of the artists that was instrumental in this whole process of doing away with the idea that there was a way of doing things in art and that you had to learn it and follow it.”

“There’s nothing necessarily new in the interviews,” Mr. Chan said, “but it does give a flavor of the man, and hopefully it does give to a new generation of people a renewed interest in Duchamp.”

dduray@observer.com

(Getty Images)

Clear your calendars next week, dear readers. Jan. 22–26 is known as Bibliography Week in New York, and many of the nation's esteemed book-history associations will be holding their annual meetings. Meanwhile, many local book organizations will host special events for the bibliographically inclined. Among the planned activities: the Grolier Club has its annual dinner at the Metropolitan Club on Friday, and the American Printing History Association gets down to work on Saturday with its annual meeting, at the Morgan Library and Museum. On the art front, the Center for Book Arts will host an open house on Saturday.

Full details about events are available over at the Grolier Club website.

The author.

From a biographical angle, it’s better to think of P.G. Wodehouse as more entertainment honcho than author. He was a member of the jet set before there were jets, and translated his shtick from one medium to another the way a sitcom producer today might branch out into movies. (Could Arrested Development have a more direct antecedent than Wodehouse?) He loved writing books, and did so compulsively, but he began his writing career at newspapers before moving on to serialized novels. He bounced between New York, England and Hollywood, offering his talent where it was required, whether for Cole Porter comedies or talkies. He ended his life on Long Island and was as American as he was British. All this is to say that the new collection of his correspondence, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (W.W. Norton, 640 pp., $35), is not only a valuable supplement to Robert McCrum’s 2004 biography, but a study of the burgeoning comedy industry.

The letters frequently circle Wodehouse’s business. It is his default topic: what he’s working on, how many words he’s written, what he’ll get for it. If money was rarely a concern for the characters in his books, the letters reveal that it was something of an obsession for him, especially early in life. Wodehouse was raised middle class. He dreamed of attending Oxford, but his parents claimed they couldn’t afford to send him there. For the future author of numerous stories set at school, or involving old school chums, it came as quite a blow. “Oh! money, money, thy name is money!” a sardonic 17-year-old Wodehouse wrote a friend at the time. Instead of Oxford, straight after Dulwich College he was forced to work at the London office of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, writing on the side when he could. It was clear enough to young Wodehouse that you really can’t do what you want without money. “If only you were making a couple of thousand a year steady,” he wrote to his most frequent correspondent, the failed writer and Dulwich grad William Townend, in 1932, “I shouldn’t have a worry in the world.” Is it any wonder that, without money problems of any kind, his characters walk on air? Townend was bonded to him not only through writing advice but also through the checks that “Plum” would include in his letters.

In the way they detail his work, the letters can often read like the ledger he kept in the early years, “Money Received for Literary Work,” which chronicled his liberation from the bank. Though the book jacket advertises his famous correspondents—Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Arthur Conan Doyle—the truth is that he didn’t write to those people very often, and hardly knew them. He never professed to be an artist, and he loathed Henry James, the Bloomsbury Group and Hemingway. The best the book offers in the way of literary gossip is a glimpse at H.G. Wells’s embarrassing uxoriousness in a mocking note to Townend, which describes how Wells’s partner had the words TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE carved in huge letters above their fireplace. Who could resist a detail like that? Wodehouse used it in The Code of the Woosters.

The letters are rarely funny, though, which is a bit surprising for a comedic master. But what can you expect from letters? Not the high-wire plots, nor the idiot characters. At best, Wodehouse was a wry correspondent. “Dear Bill, have you ever been hit by a car?” he wrote Townend in 1923, breaking some news. “If not, don’t. There’s nothing in it.” No one was more aware of how dry his letters were than Wodehouse himself. In 1953, he and Townend released a book of their correspondence, Performing Flea. In a letter about it, Wodehouse instructs his friend that intensive rewrites will be required. “If in a quickly written letter from—say—Hollywood, I just mention that Winston Churchill is there and I have met him,” he wrote in 1951, planning the volume, “in the book I can think up some amusing anecdote, describing how his trousers split up the back at the big party or something. See what I’m driving at?” Call it a desire to give them their money’s worth.

In the unadulterated letters, though, the prices Wodehouse achieved for his writing are sure to provoke some kind of reaction. By the late 1920s, still relatively early in his career, his serializations in Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post would sell for five figures. Back then, $20,000 was roughly equal to a quarter of a million dollars today. Repeat this calculation several times a year and you understand why he ended up writing more than 90 books over the course of his life.

In 1930 he went to Hollywood for a year, earning $2,000 a week for doing virtually nothing. In what can only be interpreted as an attempt to burn the bridge to such unearned money, he told The Los Angeles Times how little he did during that year, marveling, “Isn’t it amazing? If it is only ‘names’ they want, it seems such an expensive way to get them, doesn’t it?” His observation to Townend in a later letter that the interview had made him a “pariah” reads like bragging.

He seemed to enjoy the transaction of it all. Perhaps some of America’s Protestant work ethic rubbed off on him. Some of his finest work, Thank You, Jeeves and Heavy Weather, for example, was written in the early 1930s, when American and British tax authorities, who had yet to really figure out how to tax someone who hopped countries as often as he did, threatened to take much of what he had. He wrote until the end of his life, recycling old plots even after the need for money was gone. When Playboy wanted him to contribute in 1967, just eight years before he died, he wrote to his wife, “Price $1500, so I hope I shall be able to work out something.” The money couldn’t have meant much to him; it was the old thrill of being in the game.

This transactional theme comes up many times in his own defense of his work with the Nazis. In 1940 he was captured in Le Touquet, France, where he lived part of the year to avoid the British quarantine on his beloved Pekingese dogs (his “Pekes”). He and his wife failed to realize the possibility of a German conquest, and he spent six months in an internment camp. Immediately after his release, he recorded a series of humorous anecdotes about camp life that were broadcast, via Nazi radio, to the U.S., which had yet to enter the war. Not many people heard them, but when you’re working for Goebbels, it’s a matter of intent. Until the day he died (essentially in exile) on Long Island, Wodehouse maintained that this had not been a quid pro quo, but Britons at the time branded him a traitor along the lines of Lord Hee-Haw.

It’s not difficult to see why he did this incredibly stupid thing. If the letters paint a picture of the man at all, they show him to be one who never wasted material, kept a stiff upper lip at all times and would have wanted to be a polite guest to his Berlin hosts. This is to say nothing of humor as a defense mechanism. In a Wodehousian twist, the Nazis also went out of their way to turn the question of whether or not to do the broadcasts from a high-stakes problem (you could be killed if you don’t) into a low-stakes, social one. The day of his release from prison, Wodehouse was sent to a hotel in Berlin and just happened to bump into two German friends he’d met in New York and California, who welcomed him to the Reich. He seemed to think this was all a coincidence, and began work on the broadcasts that day.

More difficult to determine than why he did the broadcasts is why he never seems to have expressed any real regret about them—at least, not in this, his most exhaustive collection of letters. To his closest friends, there was only self-defense and frustration that he couldn’t sell books immediately after the war. Just after V-E Day, he disagreed with a literary journalist who claimed he should admit his error candidly. “It seems to me that anything would be better than groveling. Surely if I do, people will rank me with all the Germans who now go about saying how much they disliked the Nazis. Won’t it seem that I am simply trying to curry favour? I would much rather be thought a Benedict Arnold than a Uriah Heep.” His attitude always followed the quoted headline on a postwar interview in the British magazine The Illustrated: “I’VE BEEN A SILLY ASS.” “I haven’t suggested it yet to any of my advisers,” he wrote to another friend after the war, “but I should have thought the best proof that I had no desire to have Germany triumph and ruin England was that my entire life savings are invested in British Government securities, in which such circs would inevitably have gone phut.”

It’s safe to say he didn’t get it. Later, in a letter that touches on the foundation of Israel, Wodehouse goes out of his way to point out how much he likes all the Jews he’s known. Ira Gershwin, for example. Irving Berlin. His agent.

History exonerated Wodehouse, and Orwell spoke up for him right away. But there’s something uneasy about his own relentless defensiveness, especially given how much the country-club set still adores his books. It breaks down, slightly, the bubble in which his fiction exists and must be consumed. A recent reissue of Blandings Castle (1935) features a blurb by Tony Blair saying how much he likes Wodehouse. What to make of that? All comic geniuses have to build their own tragic barriers, through drugs, say, or neurosis. For Wodehouse, the barrier was the work itself, and with this new book we learn just how thick that barrier was.

dduray@observer.com

(Courtesy publisher)

Halfway through Always Looking (Knopf, 224 pp., $45), the third collection of John Updike’s art criticism—and the first posthumously released one—the celebrated novelist begins to rank haystacks. The snowy Claude Monet landscapes in question appear in the glossy hardback a page before the ranking, and since all of them feature a haystack or two, you would think they would all be fairly similar in quality.

Not so, says the author of Rabbit, Run. Monet, Updike writes, was always a little too generous with white paint, so that haystack in the collection at the Shelburne Museum can’t be said to be good, since it features “especially egregious” blobs of the stuff. Updike prefers his snow “sweepingly indicated,” as by Frederic Edwin Church. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s haystacks use less white, and are therefore better, but then there’s “snow on the field and none on the stacks,” which seems to irk him on a logistical level, even if it doesn’t say much about the painting. All these elements in the haystacks at the Art Institute of Chicago “miraculously succeed,” though, and he has kind words for the “coloristic venturing” in the haystacks at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. Later on that page, he praises another work for not being “effortfully strange.” Rather it is “wonderfully free.”

Ranking aside, the problem with these descriptions is that they aren’t very good. While Updike seems eager to unleash his novelist’s tool kit, and earn his bid for the reader’s time, when he expounds on the works in this book, it’s often difficult to picture the works he describes. What is “coloristic venturing?” Don’t Impressionists do it all the time? Take away the adverb and “effortfully strange” just becomes “strange,” which, like “weird” or “interesting,” is meaningless. This happens so often in the book, you could pick it at random. Max Beckmann used to put his own face in some of his paintings, rendering it “a challenging, militant complex of dramatically contrasting planes.” A figure in an Édouard Vuillard is described as “huddling deferentially.” “Magritte’s female nudes in general seem to be about (among other things) themselves.”

Like the previous two collections of Updike’s art criticism, this one is culled mostly from The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, and for someone with such an output behind him, Updike’s formula is remarkably out of sync with what is usually expected from popular criticism. Most art writing tends to be decisive, nuanced and centered around a few key ideas that build to some kind of conclusion, like any book or movie review. Updike positions himself as more of an explorer, in a meandering, Lewis and Clark vein, cataloging each and every thing he saw as he walked through a room, squeezing in biographical details and descriptive flourishes where he can. He’s a wordy tour guide, riffing on each and every painting, so in the room that even the “zombified wearers of pedagogical headsets” do not escape his adjectival assault. It’s informative, if that’s the word for it, but it proceeds without too many well-argued opinions about the art, and this doesn’t jibe at all with Updike’s clear knowledge of art history, or the buoyancy of his fiction.

Updike exists in a certain tradition as an art writer who wore a less prosaic hat in his day job. Poets John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were as beloved for their art criticism as they were for their poetry, though novelists haven’t always fared so well. Virgina Woolf’s biography of the painter Roger Fry was her last book published while she was alive and also her most reviled; as Hilton Kramer has written, it “may have hastened her death.” The era of novelists moonlighting as art critics may have made sense in the pre-MFA era ofÉmile Zola and Henry James, but in these over-educated times, you have to wonder if the age of the novelist reviewer is over.

Updike, perhaps sensing that he was a relic, stuck to his guidelines: walkthrough, biography, word-dazzle. The biographical tidbits are perhaps some of the best parts of the book. Updike describes how something was made, or guess what it was that made Edgar Degas attempt landscapes. Particularly good is the story of the collectors (and Singer sewing heirs) Stephen Carlton Clark and Robert Sterling Clark. Sterling was the more bohemian of the two, yet his tastes skewed conservative. Stephen ran the family business, but helped start the Museum of Modern Art.

It is a rigid format, though, so much so that Updike’s descriptions feel like he’s coming up to breathe. How else to explain the times when he flies off the handle? Like when he notices the “masterly rendition of the floor” in a John Singer Sargent? Or, talking about Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, his argument that the “[h]orizontal eyes and vertical half-moons in the sitter’s garments both suggest vaginas, indicating another of the painter’s interests and doing nothing to discourage persistent but unproven rumors of a romantic connection between the artist and his subject?”

The man who so memorably turned breasts into ice cream scoops in “A&P” seems like he’s trying too hard when he describes not reality but the world as already interpreted by another artist. This is a shame, because if he’d chosen to focus his attention on a few works rather than describe everything in an exhibition, he might have been able to build to some kind of a point. Finishing one of these essays gives you little to agree or disagree with. There’s just a lingering sensation of having sort of seen the show, albeit through a haze of adverbs.

There are some ideas that stick. One of the better arguments centers around the idea that Roy Lichtenstein, while mocking romance comics, did not destroy their melodrama, but instead used it as a material and magnified it, along with those comics’ size. That’s a nice concept, even if it is recycled in a later essay about a similar effect in Claes Oldenberg. And even here he couldn’t escape the call of biography, frequently wondering in the essay how the comic book artists Lichtenstein appropriated felt about all this.

But it’s disturbing when Updike seems to turn away from analysis altogether. What does it mean that 18th-century painter Gilbert Stuart frequently left part of his portraits unfinished? Updike doesn’t even guess. It would seem that the burden of proof is on Updike to say why Vuillard’s painting of his stern-looking mother, with whom he lived until he was 60, is devoid of psychological meaning (“this viewer remains unconvinced that any psychological message was delivered beyond the unintentional one of the painter’s preferences and avoidances”) yet he gives none. John Updike—John Updike!—breezes over a passage from Beckmann’s diary, in which the artist decries his “endless disgusting vegetative corporeality” and the “lewd charms with which we are coaxed again and again to take life’s bit,” to go back to methodically describing other paintings with dirty parts.

There’s a hopeful moment at the beginning of the Beckmann essay, in which Updike plows through a noisy show of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Soho in 1996 to get to the Beckmanns he really wants to see, in the rear galleries. He passes the “computer-manipulated, laser-disc-fed television monitors designed by Nam June Paik” and the work of Jenny Holzer, Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman. Wouldn’t it have been something to have him weigh in on all that? But he never mentions it again, and Updike’s tastes never ran edgier than Richard Serra, the subject of the book’s strongest essay. “Only after one emerges from all these ingeniously destabilized spaces does a question of disproportion arise,” he writes at the end of his meditation on Serra’s sculptures. “All this steel devoted to scrambling our habitual preconceptions? Wouldn’t the funhouse or the Ferris wheel at the country fair do just as well? Didn’t Cubism and Surrealism do it a century ago with little flat canvases?” The question is only slightly ironic (right on cue, he feels great sympathy for the “German steelworkers” who had to craft these behemoths), and yet he’s completely right, elegantly drawing Serra into the fold of American culture and his artistic forebears. That’s the kind of crotchetiness you can get behind. It almost makes a case that novelists, or old men who know about art but never cared for theory, might be the critics we need for this extremely conceptual moment in art history. Moments like this are too rare in this collection.

The art in this book is mostly pre-1960, which means you have, instead, things like John Updike on Norman Rockwell (he was, as you might imagine, a fan). You can’t fault someone for taking it easy in his moonlighting gig, though. Nor do you have to take the book too seriously, even if it does encourage you to do so with its title. Always Looking follows the lower-stakes Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005). Let’s hope that the superlative really does mean they won’t try to make another one.

dduray@observer.com

Chris Kraus. (Photo by Nic Amato)

The writer Chris Kraus’s move from New York to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s coincided with the birth of a particular art scene there, one that emerged from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where Mike Kelley was on the faculty and where Ms. Kraus co-taught a class called “Fictocriticism” with science fiction author Mark von Schlegell. Fictocriticism, Ms. Kraus explained over the phone from Los Angeles last week, has to do with “writing about art and ideas with the same intensity and cadence as your own problems or the party you went to last night.” She was writing frequently for Artext magazine. Her friend Giovanni Intra had co-founded a gallery called China Art Objects, kick-starting L.A.’s Chinatown gallery district. She appeared in a film made by Mr. von Schlegell and another Chinatown gallerist, simulating a sex act on a tree in a state park outside the city.

Ms. Kraus’s fourth and most recent novel, Summer of Hate, was born out of those early years in Los Angeles. Giovanni Intra appears under his own name, and Ms. Kraus’s cameo in Mr. von Schlegell’s film is alluded to, with the narrator, Catt Dunlop, a cultural critic, expressing some serious doubt about the role. The book opens with Catt fleeing L.A. to escape a dreary BDSM relationship with a man who claims to have invented a cure for aging (Catt refers to him consistently as her “killer”). She moves to the Southwest to invest in real estate and begins a relationship with Paul Garcia, recently sober and freed from incarceration for using a company credit card—he drove a truck for Halliburton—to fuel a crack and alcohol bender. The book is a romance.

Ms. Kraus is not a popular writer of fiction. Her novels, all of them published by Semiotext(e), where she’s worked as an editor for 20 years, are gaining more of an audience, but for a long time she was not read much outside of the art world. That may be because she is so difficult to classify. A theoretical novelist and critic, she writes authoritatively about contemporary art, money, television, cinema, Artaud and herself, and manages to make all of it into a polemic about the sad, flawed world around her.

Ms. Kraus’s parents emigrated from the U.S. to New Zealand at the end of the 1960s. Her father had been a warehouse manager for Cambridge University Press, and the family was given assisted passage. She studied literature and political science at Victoria University in Wellington. When she was still a teenager, she received a journalism fellowship that won her a full-time job at a daily newspaper by the time she was 18. She was the TV critic, but she was apprehensive. She moved to New York when she was 21, on a whim, to become an actress.

She lived first in a shared office space on John Street, where the bathroom was out in the hallway, before moving to the East Village and spending her time with the poets at the St. Marks Poetry Project. During this time, she worked as a messenger for Louise Bourgeois and began staging performances that combined erotica with theory. The poet Eileen Myles, Ms. Kraus’s friend and the director of the Poetry Project in the ’80s, remembers watching her stage a “quasi-strip-theory performance with another woman,” Liza Martin, a hyper-sexualized friend who haunts the pages of Ms. Kraus’s first novel, 1997’s I Love Dick. (“Liza Martin took her clothes off to an enthusiastic prime-time crowd; they put Chris on at 2 a.m. to read to 20 drunken hecklers.”) In another piece, called The Cycles of Heaven, Ms. Kraus and her then-boyfriend, the poet Steve Levine, placed their bicycles in front of an audience while they stood offstage, reciting a scripted dialogue about their crumbling relationship into microphones. It was a precursor of the “constructed realities,” to borrow a phrase from Ms. Kraus, of I Love Dick.

In 1981, Ms. Kraus began work on her first film, In Order to Pass, “a philosophical investigation into loneliness and nostalgia and sentiment and perceptions,” as she describes it, which took two years and a lot of money to complete. These days, Ms. Kraus would rather not talk about her film career.

“I was never a filmmaker,” she said. “I was a performance person fooling around with a movie camera.”

In Order to Pass culminates with a trip to an abandoned hotel in the Catskills, where 12 of Ms. Kraus’s friends act out scenes from King Lear. She was working nights to pay for the film, and when it finally debuted, it was at a bar; the few attendees casually walked in front of the projection. Around this time, Ms. Kraus met her future ex-husband, SylvèreLotringer.

MR. LOTRINGER had a reputation downtown as l’enfant terrible of Columbia University. He founded Semiotext(e) with a group of semioticians there, “at a time when no one knew what semiotics was about,” he said on the phone from California. He was dating Kathy Acker, who would eventually be published by the press, though not until later, when Ms. Kraus started her own fiction imprint at Semiotext(e) called Native Agents.

“She got interested in what we were publishing,” Mr. Lotringer said, “and also why all the authors we were publishing were male and not female. That became an issue. I never thought about it.” Native Agents started publishing writers like Lynne Tillman and Eileen Myles, women who, despite their influence, still haven’t been embraced by the publishing world.

“There’s massive cowardice in mainstream publishing,” Ms. Myles said. “The lack of dirtiness, the lack of pro-sexuality, especially female sexuality. There’s such a blackout on female writing. It’s all good-girl stuff. Even the work that really gets celebrated—there’s something really safe about it. It’s about not making men uncomfortable. But no one thinks twice about making women uncomfortable.”

Despite having a loyal and at times wide readership, Semiotext(e) was always a humble affair. When they first started dating, Ms. Kraus remembers going to Mr. Lotringer’s loft and finding him at a typewriter, transcribing interviews he’d conducted with Jean Baudrillard. Mr. Lotringer’s English translation of Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra had been cut up and pasted all over the walls. They started making films together.

“He was teaching Death in Literature and Sexuality in Literature,” Ms. Kraus said. “He had made these interviews with dominatrixes that he played for his students in Sexuality in Literature, and he collected this police videography that he used for Death in Literature. Looking at all this footage, I had the idea that the pop S&M stuff and the crime scene stuff narrated each other really well. There was something so fatuous to me about the pop S&M, and then there was a crime scene, like a literalization of the violence the dominatrixes were talking about. And so we put them together. Sylvère and I worked on that film together for over a year.”

Naturally, it was banned, though not many people noticed. Ms. Kraus made one last attempt at filmmaking with the feature-length Gravity and Grace. She had a crew of some 70 people and couldn’t manage them all. It wound up costing close to $200,000. She was shooting in New Zealand because she’d received funding there, and Mr. Lotringer was, in his own words, “always on the move.” Their relationship became strained. Gravity and Grace never found distribution. In 1995, Ms. Kraus decided to move to Los Angeles.

“I was kind of desperate to get on with my life,” she said. “None of the work that I did was getting any traction in New York. By being Sylvère’s partner, I was going around with him socially and I was really overwhelmed by his aura. People would not even look at me when they talked to me. It was all ‘Would you tell Sylvère?’ ‘Will you ask Sylvère?’ It was incredible. So when a friend offered me to take over her teaching job at Art Center when she was going on sabbatical for a year, I just jumped at the chance to do something for myself.”

But before that happened, Mr. Lotringer had been offered the job of dean of critical studies at CalArts, which he turned down. One evening in December 1994, Ms. Kraus and Mr. Lotringer dined with the man who took the position. His name was Dick Hebdige.

I LOVE DICK BEGAN, Ms. Kraus will tell you, “exactly as it says in the book.” Chris Kraus—“Chris Kraus” in the book—and Sylvère Lotringer—“Sylvère Lotringer”—had dinner with Dick Hebdige (just “Dick”). Dick flirts with Chris and she begins to write letters addressed “Dear Dick,” though, at least initially, the letters are being written by Chris and Sylvère, as veiled correspondence to each other. On one level, it’s a bizarrely faithful Victorian novel. It takes the form of a series of letters, telephone transcripts and faxes and, as a result, dates itself as a document about a certain group of people communicating in a specific way at a given time, in this case the years just before the internet made getting in touch so much easier on a technical level and so much more difficult in every other way (15 years on, the fax machine in I Love Dick is as pleasurably retro as Dr. Seward’s phonograph diary in Dracula). There’s also the very literal triangulation of desire, in which Chris and Sylvère use a third party to say to one another what they can’t say directly.

It’s small details, though, that make the book, as Ms. Myles puts it, “paradigm-shifting.” Ms. Kraus calls it “stand-up comedy.” It is more of a performance than a typical book, which is perhaps why the art world so eagerly embraced it. Unlike in most epistolary novels, the idea of authenticity is broken down immediately, because we are in on Chris and Sylvère’s little game. Chris’s writing about a fantasy relationship constructed by the real Chris Kraus in her initial letters to Dick—which were eventually sent to him in real life—becomes the premise of the novel’s first half, which makes this a kind of meta-fiction about writing meta-fiction, in which fiction supersedes reality. At one point, Chris writes in her diary, “Dear Dick, I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary …”

She pushes this idea further in Torpor, her third and, according to Ms. Kraus, “most personal novel.” There’s a remarkable scene in which the protagonists, Sylvie, “a punk-formalist film and videomaker” and Jerome, “a pariah in Columbia’s Department of French Literature and Philology,” are in the Paris loft of Felix Guattari during the Christmas holiday, watching the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu on television, the broadcast turning history into a prime-time event. Ms. Kraus reminds her readers that as history was falling apart on TV in Eastern Europe, the most popular show stateside was Thirtysomething.

The romantic fantasy in I Love Dick is made even messier by the fact that Dick is, well, kind of a dick. When he and Chris, who has at this point left Sylvère, finally sleep together, an account that is related by Chris, reminiscing in another letter to Dick after the fact, they “have sex ’til breathing feels like fucking.” In the morning, though, he kicks her out by telling her he has a “friend” coming for the weekend. “I guess you were right about disappointment,” Chris recalls telling him. “Probably if I’d known I wouldn’t’ve stayed.” He responds: “What? You think I’m cheating on you?” Later, in the book’s deferred climax, when Dick writes back for the first and only time, he addresses the letter to Sylvère, and spells Chris “Kris.”

Just before the book’s release, a publishing reporter for New York magazine caught on to the fact that Dick, an English cultural critic, “sounds an awful lot like Dick Hebdige, the ruggedly handsome British-born author of such books as Subculture: The Meaning of Style.”

“So they called him up,” Ms. Kraus said. “And he was so appalled by the book that, just to get the chance to call me a crazy witch in print, he was glad to be quoted as Dick Hebdige. Before he even knew this was happening, I changed every detail about him. I changed his appearance, I changed where he was from, I changed the title of his book. When I was citing a ‘book’ by Dick Hebdige, I was citing my own writing, writing that would be in my next book [Aliens & Anorexia]. Before the book came out, I said, ‘Dick, would you like to write the introduction? If you do that, everyone will think it’s a joke that we cooked up together.’ And he was like, ‘If you even think of doing such a thing, it proves you don’t know me.’ I felt like I had done everything I could to protect him, short of burying my own work, which I wasn’t going to do.”

In the end, it hardly matters who Dick is based on. In interviews, Ms. Kraus has referred to him as any Dick, “the Ur-Dick,” a way of “speaking to men and through men,” as the novelist Sheila Heti, one of Ms. Kraus’s admirers, put it in an interview. Even Mr. Lotringer saw him as something of a vessel for a project that was greater than him. “Dick was very dispensable at the time,” he said. “He just made life more exciting.”

Mr. Hebdige did not respond to an interview request.

THE SCENE MS. KRAUS FOUND herself in during her early days in Los Angeles fell apart. Giovanni Intra died of a heroin overdose, Mark von Schlegell left town, and Artext closed. In 2004, Ms. Kraus went to Albuquerque, invested in real estate and began living with an ex-con. She was burned out, she said, from the “entire intellectual, artistic, cultural world during the Bush years.”

The rest of Summer of Hate, the new novel, deals with Catt navigating a variety of systems—sexual, financial and, in the novel’s tragic turn, criminal, as her new lover Paul is arrested for a hit-and-run that happened nine years earlier, when he was coming down from a crack binge. The novel began as a series of long, journalistic reports that Ms. Kraus wrote to Mr. von Schlegell about her experiences dealing with lawyers’ fees, prison guards and the Arizona court system. Near the beginning of the book, as Catt is deciding whether or not to carry on the relationship with her “killer,” the delusional dominant, Ms. Kraus writes:

It would be a classical feminine death, like a marriage … She saw her descent: money rapidly spent and as it dwindled, her killer growing bored of her submission. She would end up on the floor, not as a corpse but on her hands and knees, hollowed out, begging and lost. What frightened her most was that even this realist death held a certain appeal.

 She escapes anyway.

mmiller@observer.com

From the book. (Courtesy Fulton Ryder)

Last night at Smalls Jazz Club in the West Village, Richard Prince's imprint Fulton Ryder celebrated the debut of a new book by Dan Colen, A Real Bronx Cheer. If you'll head over now to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, you'll see things got pretty bonkers.

From that story:

The supermodel Stephanie Seymour read God jokes that the artist had found on the Internet, while the magician David Blaine held his breath in a plastic bag onstage next to her.

The events are described as "madcap," which sounds about right.

The book is divided into three parts: Part I focuses on letters, contracts, diaries and other writings; Part II is a catalogue raisonné of Leonardo's paintings; Part III includes 663 drawings arranged by category. The new edition of the book, according to a release, also "discusses the most recent findings of Leonardo scholarship and debates controversial new attributions."

Smee. (Courtesy the Boston Globe)

Sebastian Smee, chief art critic for the Boston Globe, has sold a book about friendship and rivalry between artists, specifically Edgard Degas and Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The book, it was announced yesterday via Publishers Marketplace, was sold to editor David Ebershoff at Random House.

Mr. Smee, who picked up a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism in 2011 (for "his vivid and exuberant writing about art"), is already something of an expert on artist rivalries. One of his two previous books, Side by Side: Picasso v. Matisse (2002), delved into the issue of the friendship and rivalry between Picasso and Matisse and how it affected the artists' work. So, we imagine this will be a cake walk for Mr. Smee. His other book was on Lucian Freud.

After an auction, the much buzzed-about book was sold to Mr. Ebershoff, who is Gary Shteyngart and Curtis Sittenfeld's editor and was Norman Mailer's editor in the last five years of his life.

Congratulations to Mr. Smee.