An unforgettable new novel from the "powerfully original" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) author of the cult classic I Love Dick--a stark, witty journey into a fractured, violent America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder on Minnesota's Iron Range.
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called "meth community," the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota--between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul's addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range--Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.
"The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable... I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too." --Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake
"Aliens & Anorexia is a tantalizing, messy, wildly associative and often brilliant book that leaps effortlessly between autobiography, art criticism, philosophy, and fiction.... There are more ideas on every page of Aliens & Anorexia than in most books published in the last year. It was an exciting and courageous work." --Ben Ehrenreich
"I know there was a time before I read Chris Kraus's I Love Dick... but it's hard to imagine; some works of art do this to you. They tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle (in this case, what the form of the novel can handle) that there is no way to re-create your mind before your encounter with them." --Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour