8 d. ago The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus review – a cult writer tries something new

The I Love Dick author combines autofiction with memoir and true crimeThe Four Spent the Day Together is full of people seeking fresh starts, attempting to give up drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus uses the phrase a lot, making it wilfully jaded in its repetitions. “He could make a fresh start.” “They decided to make a fresh start.” And all along, here she is, making her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as the old ones.Kraus is an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, comprised of letters to an unreceptive lover, turning confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She carried on writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy the letter form brought to the voic...

Politics

2 w. ago Olivia Attwood ‘fighting for her marriage’ as Bradley Dack ‘embarrassed’ by her behaviour

Following an undeniably tricky few months, a source claims Olivia Attwood and her husband Bradley Dick are still very much love each other and she'll 'fight' to save their relationship

Politics

2 w. ago Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers review – a trip inside the frazzled mind of Klaus Kinski

The German actor’s real-life meltdown is the springboard for this compelling autofictional account, in which the author sets out to write about Kinski during lockdownA show-stealing villain in spaghetti westerns and slasher flicks with titles such as Schizoid and Psychopath, the German actor Klaus Kinski – “a demented Teutonic version of Dennis Hopper”, as one tribute had it – is known best for his testy collaboration with Werner Herzog, whose 1982 film Fitzcarraldo put Kinski in the title role, lugging a steamship over the Andes. A terror on set as well as on screen, he was offered a part in Indiana Jones but told Steven Spielberg the Raiders of the Lost Ark script was a “pile of shit”.Benjamin Myers’s new novel plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind during one of his last performances, a recorded solo stage show in West Berlin in 1971, where he delivered a ferocious monologue as Jesus, “the freest and most modern of men, who preferred to be massacred than rot alive w...

Politics

2 w. ago Literary fiction of the highest order: BOG QUEEN by Anna North, HEAP EARTH UPON IT by Chloe Michelle Howarth, THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER by Chris Kraus

Anthony Cummins reviews this week's literary fiction

Politics

3 w. ago ‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

When the novelist was faced with the decision of whether to pursue fertility treatment or focus on her career, her literary ambitions kicked inFifteen years ago, having said all my life that I never wanted a baby, that I couldn’t fathom why any free woman would do such a thing to her body and her mind, I suddenly and passionately wanted a child. I remember where I was when this feeling, so heretical to me, arrived: it was early morning in London, and having come down Fleet Street on my way to work, I was standing at the till of a newsagents to pay for a Diet Coke, a flapjack and a pack of Silk Cut. There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately – because I’ve never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age – my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child.When for s...

Culture

3 w. ago ‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addictChris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support th...

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