This article is taken from the autumn 2025 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

Few writers have shaken up contemporary culture like Chris Kraus. Her cult classic I Love Dick (1997) – part love letter, part feminist theory, part salacious memoir – tore through literary convention with its delirious portrayal of feminine desire. It’s a shameless and savage read, much like the rest of her work – from her lacerating, formally restless 2000 novel Aliens and Anorexia to her irreverent biography of punk legend Kathy Acker. As a longtime editor at indie publisher Semiotext(e), Kraus has also spent decades championing voices from the intellectual margins, helping to import high theory, punk polemics and radical new writing into the cultural mainstream.

With her new novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, Kraus shifts her focus to the moral murk of storytelling itself. Spanning decades and states – from 60s Connecticut to post-industrial Minnesota – the book follows one woman’s attempt to make sense of a brutal murder. It’s a study of American alienation, class inequality and our obsession with narrativising other people’s lives. For this issue, the author has curated a syllabus of books, films and other cultural artefacts that have helped shape her thinking. Much like her own work, these selections don’t play it safe. “A lot of these are examples of wilful non-self-censorship in the literary and art world,” says Kraus, “where the stakes and the cost for these people are extremely, personally high.”

READ: IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO, CHESTER HIMES

“Chester Himes was incarcerated for armed burglary when he was 19. His 1953 novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, was about his prison experience, but the race of his character was changed to white by the publisher – they didn’t want to publish a book with a Black protagonist. He wrote several great novels. His debut, If He Hollers Let Him Go, was about post-World War II LA. He found it to be a deeply racist place; an insidious, bone-deep racism, more disturbing than that of the South. His literary fiction was never really appreciated until after his death, but he didn’t give a shit. He also made an enemy of James Baldwin, who hated his work and spoke very virulently against it. Baldwin had the more dignified, establishment position, and Himes was just wild with rage. He was uncontrollable.”

WATCH: GOMORRAH (2006)

“Gomorrah is a story of the Sicilian Mafia. Investigative reporter Roberto Saviano, who wrote the book it was based on, had infiltrated the group and suffered death threats for many years as a result. What’s so radical about both the book and film is that there is nothing psychological or human in their portrayals. The mafia killings were purely mechanical, driven by business and profit motives. It is just pure late capitalism, exposed. Watching that film radicalised me, because you never see that: we always try and make it palatable by adding a psychological or human dimension where there is none.”

FOLLOW: @CASUALENCOUNTERZ

“Literary event series Casual Encounterz takes all our trashiest impulses that come out on social media, turns them inside out, and puts them on the table. It’s hilariously offensive and outrageous. Founder Sammy Loren is just a genius when it comes to bringing people together. He puts on these events that are absolutely packed with not all the usual suspects, and has created this entirely new channel for LA literary fiction that includes club kids and fashion people.”

READ: THE GAMBLER, FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

“I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone write so well about addiction. I spent many years living alongside it, and it’s very debilitating for everyone it touches. I think a mistake that a lot of well-meaning, progressive people often make is thinking that everyone has their brains, and is capable of making reasoned decisions that are in their best interest. But things like addiction and poverty really change a person, and prevent them from making the same kind of decisions. People act against their best interests over and over again – and Dostoevsky shows that brilliantly.”

WATCH: LAWS OF GRAVITY (1992)

“This film by Nick Gomez is about a group of young people in ungentrified Brooklyn, who are in and out of crime and the criminal justice system. Once again, it exposes the idea that people do not always work in their best interests.   There’s something about the setup that they’re trapped in that creates negative entropy: things can only get worse. 

SUBSCRIBE: THE WHITNEY REVIEW

“Literary zine The Whitney Review just sprang up out of nowhere. Founder editor Whitney Mallett has created something really important with it: she put a bomb in the middle of New York’s literary establishment and opened it up very, very wide. The people who contribute are both known and unknown, established and not, and they’re all incredibly intelligent and original perspectives that you don’t normally see in other places.”

DO: PROTEST

“Protest is very important. Bodies in the streets means something. It feels so futile, but ultimately it’s not. Eventually, things reach a critical mass that leads to institutional change. Perception is 80% of reality: once perception changes, then reality changes. I also think you should have humility and consider everything as potentially important. People still follow the received ideas of what’s important, and I think you need to figure out for yourself what matters and trust your own instincts.”

READ/WATCH: IN COLD BLOOD

In Cold Blood is so perfectly mid-century American, in a way that is completely not applicable now, almost a century later. This was written in 1965, before the internet and social media, so you see how unguarded everything was, and the total access that an outsider like Capote could gain. We’re very suspicious now. When I started researching a true crime case for The Four Spent The Day Together, most people were extremely guarded, and there were protocols in place that prevented people from talking to me. Everyone has been burned at least once: something you put on your social media when you were 12 can come back and be used against you; tiny shards of material can be taken out of context and used to build a case against a person. In Cold Blood is masterful in the way that it penetrates the facades of the main characters. And of course, it’s a closeted gay romance too, with Dick and Perry. A beautiful book.”

THINK: SIMONE WEIL

“Activist and philosopher Simone Weil broke with the French Communist Party in the 1930s to support the unemployed. It was a great work of radical empathy because, for the French Communist Party and the trade unions of the time, the unemployed didn’t exist. They weren’t workers. They were the lowest of the low, the dispossessed. Weil was so avid and so relentlessly curious, and she knew: we have to extend ourselves to their world.”

The Four Spent The Day Together is out now