Chris Kraus The Four Spent the Day Together review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author. Scribner will publish the new Chris Kraus novel, on October 7, 2025.
Chris Kraus The Four Spent the Day Together review
- “The novelist Chris Kraus doesn’t demand your attention but earns it. There’s a steady quality to her observations and her truth-dealing, one that makes you want to see more clearly and live more deliberately. Some writers make life seem like a game. Kraus, who is also a filmmaker and art critic, makes it seem like a project.” (The New York Times)
- “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)
- “The Four Spent the Day Together is searing politics by storytelling, a novel constructed through counterpoint as it moves among the drowned, the drowning, and the survivors of the brutal American landscape we live in now.” (Siri Hustvedt)
- “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)
- “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)
The Four Spent the Day Together
- Author: Chris Kraus (United States)
- Book type: American novel, crime novel
- Publisher: Scribner
- To be released: 7 October 2025
- Length: 320 pages
- Format: hardcover / ebook / audiobook
- Prize: $ 29.00 / $ 14,99 / $ 24.99
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the new book by Chris Kraus
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.
Chris Kraus was born in 1955 in New Yrol City. She 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.
