Outsiders and Insiders - The Four Spent the Day Together
Bestselling
author Chris Kraus will introduce her upcoming novel The Four Spent
the Day Together, a three-part portrait of modern America in an age of
social media, paralysing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf
between rich and poor.
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, Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case,
which soon becomes an obsession.
A
reading will be followed by a conversation with Shaun Wilson Ph.D,
author of Malc’s Boy, in which Chris will discuss her new novel,
her writing process and the role of art and literature in a post-truth era.
About the Speaker
"Chris Kraus is 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
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.
