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The Four Spent the Day Together
"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 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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Scribner Book Company
- Publish Date: Oct 7th, 2025
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.50in - 1.20in - 0.85lb
- EAN: 9781668098684
- Categories: • Feminist• Women• World Literature - American - 21st Century
About the Author
Kraus, Chris: - Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism--Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020-2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
Praise for this book
Praise for The Four Spent the Day Together "Kraus' relentless curiosity is a gravitational force."
--Kirkus "This is a novel of the American moment by a writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents. Chris Kraus has a gift for making intimate things part of a pattern and for making that pattern a fresh and engaged way of dramatizing the way we live now."
--Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin "It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written."
--Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy "This is an entirely new kind of novel, one that shows how helplessly connected we are to our time and to each other. It's rich, heartbreaking and powerful."
--Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life" "I always so admire the work of Chris Kraus for the astringent truths contained there. The Four Spend the Day Together is no exception. What a sharp, smart, unsettling, memorable work it is."
--Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment "The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare--at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer--she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking."
--Constance Debré, author of Name "Unlike so many books one reads, this book is a real book. Chris Kraus is one of America's best--purest, least corporate, most bracingly weird--writers. She's an artist of the margins: of crime and addiction and fallenness, of the indignity of poverty and the injustices of class. She's serious but never, ever a drag: funny and ironic, a gentle spirit who knows, when need be, how to wield a knife. American literature would be healthier--more vital, more fun--if more people read Chris Kraus."
--Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work "Excellent retelling of an American nightmare with its unique Chris Kraus prose: sharp, bold, fast paced and piercingly direct. The Four Spent The Day Together will be a great read for anyone who is passionate about understanding the complexity of marginal lives and the danger of living on the edge."
--Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle "What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising and bold book this is... Kraus matches the elegance of Capote's In Cold Blood and his refusal of narrative or moral simplicity. She similarly paints a rich, honest picture of social class in America, and the ways in which class and circumstance constrain a life... Each story feels frank, humane and revelatory. Each life is detailed with so much compassion. I really loved the honesty of this book. I couldn't stop reading it and I will recommend it to everyone."
--Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City
"This is the best Chris Kraus book to date, both more literary and way crazier than her previous classics. I loved it!"
--Stewart Home, author of Fascist Yoga "Unflinchingly honest, The Four Spent the Day Together is a spry exploration of self and society. From the book's beginnings in Milford, Connecticut, to its looming conclusion in Harding, Minnesota, Kraus evokes an America which is both expansive and exacting. Kraus is not only a master of auto-fiction, but a thorough and thoughtful reporter."
--Catherine Airey, author of Confessions
--Kirkus "This is a novel of the American moment by a writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents. Chris Kraus has a gift for making intimate things part of a pattern and for making that pattern a fresh and engaged way of dramatizing the way we live now."
--Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin "It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written."
--Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy "This is an entirely new kind of novel, one that shows how helplessly connected we are to our time and to each other. It's rich, heartbreaking and powerful."
--Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life" "I always so admire the work of Chris Kraus for the astringent truths contained there. The Four Spend the Day Together is no exception. What a sharp, smart, unsettling, memorable work it is."
--Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment "The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare--at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer--she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking."
--Constance Debré, author of Name "Unlike so many books one reads, this book is a real book. Chris Kraus is one of America's best--purest, least corporate, most bracingly weird--writers. She's an artist of the margins: of crime and addiction and fallenness, of the indignity of poverty and the injustices of class. She's serious but never, ever a drag: funny and ironic, a gentle spirit who knows, when need be, how to wield a knife. American literature would be healthier--more vital, more fun--if more people read Chris Kraus."
--Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work "Excellent retelling of an American nightmare with its unique Chris Kraus prose: sharp, bold, fast paced and piercingly direct. The Four Spent The Day Together will be a great read for anyone who is passionate about understanding the complexity of marginal lives and the danger of living on the edge."
--Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle "What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising and bold book this is... Kraus matches the elegance of Capote's In Cold Blood and his refusal of narrative or moral simplicity. She similarly paints a rich, honest picture of social class in America, and the ways in which class and circumstance constrain a life... Each story feels frank, humane and revelatory. Each life is detailed with so much compassion. I really loved the honesty of this book. I couldn't stop reading it and I will recommend it to everyone."
--Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City
"This is the best Chris Kraus book to date, both more literary and way crazier than her previous classics. I loved it!"
--Stewart Home, author of Fascist Yoga "Unflinchingly honest, The Four Spent the Day Together is a spry exploration of self and society. From the book's beginnings in Milford, Connecticut, to its looming conclusion in Harding, Minnesota, Kraus evokes an America which is both expansive and exacting. Kraus is not only a master of auto-fiction, but a thorough and thoughtful reporter."
--Catherine Airey, author of Confessions