Outsiders and Insiders

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.