It’s 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as ‘an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction’ and ‘an amateur intellectual’s home video expanded to bulimic lengths’ … It’s 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a ‘radical philosophy of sadness’ and ‘immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical’ … It’s the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for her s/m partner to reply to her emails … It’s 1943, and Simone Weil is in London, completing her project of transcendence by dying of starvation … Filled with Chris Kraus’ trademark wit and frankness, unfolding to reveal the lives of ecstatic visionaries and failed artists, Aliens & Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.