This book comes with a reputation, though it's not the one you might expect from the title, which leaps from the gorgeous, faux-innocent cover. Chris Kraus's "novel" was first published in the US in 1997 and has become recognised as both an influential feminist text and a key intervention in the debate over where life-writing ends and fiction begins ... What remains so brilliant about the book is the real, useful thought that Kraus builds out of her romantic fantasy ... You can call it a novel, then, but it's as a philosophical and cultural critique that I Love Dick bites hardest.

A literary must-have accessory, a relentlessly clever-clever book at fits neatly into the radical space recently opened up by semi-autobiographical novelists such as Nell Zink and Elena Ferrante ... It has some hugely arresting things to say about women's relationships with creative self-determination.

A formidable novel of ideas

This is the most important book written about men and women written in the last century... why is this revolutionary 18-year-old book finding its biggest audience only now? The answer lies in its own pages, when Kraus writes that "who gets to speak, and why, is the only question". In the last half a decade, women have been permitted to speak in a different way than before; women artists who use details of their own lives in their work are not as easily dismissed as they once were. The internet enables hordes of frightened, anonymous men to try to silence women via harassment and shaming, but it has also enabled our voices to be heard on a grander scale, with fewer intermediaries, than ever before. We are able to write our own letters to Dick now, and to publish them widely: to tell Dick exactly what we think of him, whether he likes it or not.This book will only become more relevant. Its time is now - and now, and now, for the rest of eternity.

The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable - especially now, when everything is so confusing, so full of despair. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.

Read this on the bus - we dare you

One of the most important feminist novels of the past two decades -

I Love Dick is a classic. Here pain is the aphrodisiac and distance is the muse. Unrequited love is transformed into a fascinating book of ideas.

The skill of the book allows the reader to enter into the fantasy (the one sex scene is torturous, but hot) while knowing it's destructive and one-sided. Chris recognises how vulnerable - ridiculous even - infatuation has made her. But she glories in the surrender ... This is a brilliant, experimental rollercoaster of a book ... there's something radical about a woman who pushes herself to the edge, finally to recover.