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

A most anticipated book of the year from W Magazine, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Four Spent the Day Together 

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

“The novelist Chris Kraus doesn’t demand your attention but earns it. There’s a steady quality to her observations and her truth-dealing, one that makes you want to see more clearly and live more deliberately. Some writers make life seem like a game. Kraus, who is also a filmmaker and art critic, makes it seem like a project.”
—The New York Times  

“A new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic.” —The Guardian

“The Four Spent the Day Together…seems to be [Kraus’] 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, which is spinning out at such an accelerated rate that the capacities for critical thinking, reason, and humanity seem to be flying off its citizens as lightly as ash and dust.”
—Bookforum
 
“Kraus’ relentless curiosity is a gravitational force.”
—Kirkus

“Kraus' writing is deliberate and hard-hitting as she lets readers draw their own conclusions about the ever-relative nature of redemption and corrupting power of capitalism.”
—Booklist

“The power of this novel is cumulative, the book’s three discrete sections forming not so much a sequence as a circle ... The fact that The Four Spent the Day Together is at the same time so formally inventive stands as further testament to her skill and audacity as a writer.” 
—The Times Literary Supplement

“An episodic journey … It is an attempt to make sense of chaos. Kraus bears witness to a nation reckoning with its undoing … Though Kraus distances herself from the term “autofiction”, this novel sits comfortably alongside works by Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti and Olivia Laing, abandoning conventional plot and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.” 
—The Saturday Paper

“[The Four Spent the Day Together] is a fast-paced mystery told in three interconnected parts that culminate in a subtle reflection on class, power, and the banality of our brute instincts… a novel that considers the opacity of human nature.” 
—The Paris Review

“Another genius twist of the knife.”
—4Columns

“Chris Kraus’s latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, offers an X-ray of the [true crime] genre’s rapidly fracturing foundations….Kraus’s oeuvre makes a mockery of the very word 'why.' Studious attention to ostensible accidents allows systemic forces to come to the fore…Kraus’s writing is an exercise in extended eye contact—through the discomfort, finding grace in a stranger’s twitching iris.”
—Cultured Magazine

“This is a novel of the American moment by a writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents.  Chris Kraus has a gift for making intimate things part of a pattern and for making that pattern a fresh and engaged way of dramatizing the way we live now.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of The News from Dublin

“The Four Spent the Day Together is searing politics by storytelling, a novel constructed through counterpoint as it moves among the drowned, the drowning, and the survivors of the brutal American landscape we live in now.”  
—Siri Hustvedt, author of What I Loved

“It’s really, really good. Maybe the best thing she’s written.” 
—Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy 

“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, author of a “Working Life”

“I always so admire the work of Chris Kraus for the astringent truths contained there. The Four Spend the Day Together is no exception. What a sharp, smart, unsettling, memorable work it is.” 
—Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment

“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

“Unlike so many books one reads, this book is 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

“Excellent retelling of an American nightmare with its unique Chris Kraus prose: sharp, bold, fast paced and piercingly direct. The Four Spent The Day Together will be a great read for anyone who is passionate about understanding the complexity of marginal lives and the danger of living on the edge.”
—Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

“What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising and bold book this is… 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… 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 the best Chris Kraus book to date, both more literary and way crazier than her previous classics. I loved it!” 
—Stewart Home, author of Fascist Yoga

“Unflinchingly honest, The Four Spent the Day Together is a spry exploration of self and society. From the book's beginnings in Milford, Connecticut, to its looming conclusion in Harding, Minnesota, Kraus evokes an America which is both expansive and exacting. Kraus is not only a master of auto-fiction, but a thorough and thoughtful reporter.”
—Catherine Airey, author of Confessions