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