The Four Spent the Day Together (Paperback or Softback)

An LA Review of Books Best Book of 2025
A New Yorker Recommended Book of 2025

“Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel.” —The New Yorker

“[Kraus’s] version of a classic American tragedy…a dazzling, refined work, formally and otherwise—at once tracking the far-reaching tentacles of addiction, and the trajectory of an almost unrecognizable America.” —Bookforum

A critically acclaimed novel from Chris Kraus—author of the classic I Love Dick, a cult literary figure, and one of autofiction’s truest innovators—about addiction, violence, and the American underclass.

On Minnesota’s Iron Range, on the cold, depressed fringes of the so-called meth community, three teenagers shoot and kill an older acquaintance and are quickly arrested and imprisoned. Catt Greene, living nearby with her husband, Paul, soon becomes obsessed with the case, turning away from her personal turmoil—her husband’s compulsive drinking, her uneasy moves between the art world of LA and the rural poverty or northern Minnesota—and toward an investigation of the teenagers’ brutal, desperate lives.

Expansive and piercing, linking together the stories of Catt’s childhood, her marriage, and this ruthless, arbitrary murder, The Four Spent the Day Together is a riveting journey into the decline of the American working class

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 she is also the author of the literary biography After Kathy Acker. 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 of Design 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.