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Table of Contents
About The Book
“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.
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.
About The Author
Photograph by Alan Marcus
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (October 7, 2025)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668098707
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Raves and Reviews
Praise for The Four Spent the Day Together
“It’s really, really good. Maybe the best thing she’s written.” —Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy
“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
Praise for Chris Kraus
“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
Praise for I Love Dick
“Reading I Love Dick made me laugh—cry—but most importantly it made me think about all the important issues of our time, DESIRE, AGING—Dick is a mere backdrop for this provocative meditation—it's edgy and deep.” —bell hooks, author of All About Love
“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
Praise for Aliens & Anorexia
“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
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): The Four Spent the Day Together eBook 9781668098707
- Author Photo (jpg): Chris Kraus Photograph by Alan Marcus(0.1 MB)
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