Overview

‘Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel’ The New Yorker ‘A writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents’ Colm Tóibín ‘This is Chris Kraus’s masterpiece’ Constance Debré An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic I Love Dick — a witty, probing journey into a fractured America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder. 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, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it. 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. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy 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 mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through 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 histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.

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9781917189255

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Reviews

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 humour, too.’ -- Rachel Kushner, author of <i>Creation Lake</i> Praise for I Love Dick: ‘Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick offers the story of a woman named Chris Kraus — also an experimental filmmaker, just like the author — reckoning with her unrequited love for “Dick ____”, a cultural critic with whom she becomes obsessed. The narrative is an exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act.’ * New York Times * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘The most important book about men and women written in the last century.’ * The Guardian * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘A clever, finely crafted crossover between life, love, and cultural studies.’ * The Australian * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘Tart, brazen and funny … a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behaviour, power, control.’ * The Nation * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘Devastatingly funny and sublime … a new classic.’ * The Seattle Stranger * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘A little masterpiece of late twentieth century literature.’ * East Hampton Star * Praise for I Love Dick: ‘Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating, and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page … I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind.’ * Post Road *

Author Information

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published in 2017. 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.

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