Reading & discussion

Reading and discussion with Chris Kraus and Constance Debré

Chris Kraus, joined by Constance Debré, will read from and discuss her forthcoming novel The Four Spent the Day Together and its prequel, Summer of Hate.

Both novels staddle the gulf between the cultural worlds of New York and LA and the hinterland towns of the northern Midwest. Kraus writes the interior worlds of people caught up in the criminal justice system for no reason beyond addiction and poverty. In the manner of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, her forthcoming book traces the lives of three teenagers on the fringe of the “meth community” who kidnap and kill an older acquaintance after spending the day with him.

In both books, Kraus abandons her own high-culture world to experience and articulate the consciousness of American underclass life.

The readings will be followed by a conversation between Kraus and Debré, and a signing for Chris Kraus’s previous books.

Date: Saturday, March 1st
Time: 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Place: The Tower, Auditorium (1st floor)
Price: Free admission, booking required

The discussion will take place in English.

Practical Information

From 1 March 2025 to 1 March 2025

The Tower, Auditorium, Level 1

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The residency

Since January and until March 2025, Chris Kraus is taking part in the LUMA Arles residency program. This program invites all year long, thinkers, researchers, writers, curators, and other practitioners to conduct research and carry out projects related to their artistic fields.

During her residency, she develops new projects, as did Constance Debré, who wrote the book Nom (published in February 2022 by Flammarion) during her stay from October 2020 to January 2021. On March 25, 2022, LUMA Arles organized an event where she read an excerpt from her book.

Chris Kraus

Voir la page de l’artiste

Chris Kraus was in residence at LUMA Arles in january and march 2025.

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. Her novels include Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate, and she has published three cultural criticism books: Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television, and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press in 2017.

A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020 and 2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. New York Times critic Dwight Garner has called her “a powerfully original writer,” and Index magazine described her as “one of the most subversive voices in American fiction.” Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Constance Debré

Voir la page de l’artiste

Constance Debré was in residence at LUMA Arles from october 2020 to january 2021.

Constance Debré was born in Paris, France in 1972. She studied at the Lycée Henri-IV and was a criminal lawyer until 2018. She has published two novels: Play Boy (Stock, 2018), and Love Me Tender (Flammarion, 2020). Her books are published by Flammarion in France and by Semiotext(e) in the USA, a publishing house co-directed by Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti. As part of her residency at Luma Arles, Constance Debré is working on her next opus. “The work begun in my previous books, which I intend to continue in this way, explores the possibility (?) of being oneself.” It raises the question of the construction of an identity shaped by a double movement, the horizontal movement of narration, as well as the vertical movement of the emancipation of the subject (the narrator) from social, sexual and family identities. Construction, deconstruction, as it were.