Set at the dawn of the New World Order, Chris Kraus' third novel loops back to the era where I Love Dick, her cult-classic debut, began. It's summer, 1991: post-MTV, pre-AOL. Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green, two displaced New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment, set off on a journey across the former Soviet Bloc with the specious goal of adopting a Romanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere they go, and wars are erupting across Yugoslavia. Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torpor reveals the negative entropy of the present, haunted by the persistence of historical memory.

"Torpor is as good a Grand Tour love story as James or Wharton, a brilliant study of a Holocaust survivor, a brilliant study of the moral character of philosophers, the art world, academia, ambition, real estate, sex, orphans, and the fall of Romania. She writes about the strangeness of the world in a clear American prose filled with emotion, but with no vapors of style and forced effect to hide behind. I've read all of her bookCovers. Chris Kraus is a great writer." — Michael Tolkin, author of The Player and Among the Dead

"Torpor is probably the least torpid work of prose you are likely to read in a long time. Horrifically vulnerable and preternaturally shrewd, limpid and Byzantine in the same breath, Chris Kraus' book is the kind of surprise package, like Bunuel's Viridiana, that blows up in the face of its target to the delight of the rest of the world." -- Gary Indiana, author of Resentment, and The Schwarzenegger Syndrome