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 dramatising the way we live now. -- Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island Its really, really good. Maybe the best thing shes written. -- Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy Unlike so many books one reads, this book is like a real book. Chris Kraus is one of Americas best purest, least corporate, most bracingly weird writers. Shes an artist of the margins: of crime and addiction and fallenness, of the indignity of poverty and the injustices of class. Shes 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 Krauss 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 whats 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 Capotes 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 couldnt stop reading it and I will recommend it to everyone. -- Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City 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 Krauss 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 *
