‘Unlike so many books one reads, this book is like a real book. Chris Kraus is one of America’s best — purest, least corporate, most bracingly weird — writers. She’s an artist of the margins: of crime and addiction and fallenness, of the indignity of poverty and the injustices of class. She’s serious but never, ever a drag: funny and ironic, a gentle spirit who knows, when need be, how to wield a knife. American literature would be healthier — more vital, more fun — if more people read Chris Kraus.’
Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: her life and work
‘The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare — at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus’s masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer — she is just 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
‘What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising, and bold book this is. It is not at all what I expected. I went in thinking of my favourite true crime classics. And it is true that Kraus matches the elegance of Capote’s In Cold Blood and his refusal of narrative or moral simplicity. She similarly paints a rich, honest picture of social class in America, and the ways in which class and circumstance constrain a life. Yet Kraus also scales nimbly over time to thread together parallel stories of lives quietly falling apart. She affords these so much complexity and grace. One minute we are in the 60s in the Bronx with a lonely young mother, constrained by her financial circumstances and the demands of her children. The next an alcoholic continually relapses, sending his life into disarray. Meanwhile an old marriage ends in divorce and so a decades long best friendship slowly fades. Each story feels frank, humane and revelatory. Each life is detailed with so much compassion. I really loved the honesty of this book. I couldn’t stop reading it and I will recommend it to everyone.’
Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City
‘This is an entirely new kind of novel, one that shows how helplessly connected we are to our time and to each other. It’s rich, heartbreaking, and powerful.’
Eileen Myles
‘This is the best Chris Kraus book to date, both more literary and way crazier than her previous classics. I loved it!’
Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess
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 Creation Lake
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.’
The 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
