Valerie is an art worker in the big city. Literally the product of an American childhood in a small place
where she learned to value objects and their promise, Valerie now lives and works in a storm of things,
many of which are commodities—including herself.
While unhappily but compliantly selling paintings at a high-pressure art gallery, Valerie meets a
charismatic shoplifter, Ted, who steals everything he needs and housesits for wealthy New Yorkers to
avoid having a job and paying rent. Valerie begins shoplifting with Ted in an effort to free herself from a
culture industry that functions as little more than a glossy excuse for murderously extractive global
economy, but soon discovers that escape from financial transaction doesn’t necessarily mean escape from
emotional transaction. What’s more, as a white millennial woman, Valerie realizes that her very being is
intimately wrapped up in the systems she seeks to escape. Thieving becomes Valerie’s way of meditating
on this impasse: is her liberation synonymous with her self-obliteration? Or is there another way out?
For readers of Chris Kraus and Ben Lerner, this urbane, semi-psychedelic bildungsroman brilliantly
interrogates the consumption and reflexivity of white American young womanhood in whip-smart,
sharply humorous prose. Thieves moves between the personal and political, the mundane and fantastical,
to eviscerate the industries that produce its protagonist’s freedoms and responsibilities.
