When it comes to the ins and outs of the art world, “truth is stranger than fiction” rarely applies. This month, our editorial team decided to reflect on eight novels we’re reading that illuminate elements of art-making and spark our imaginations in a way catalogs and monographs cannot. Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian dissects the relationship between artistry and loss in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, while Reviews Editor Natalie Haddad recommends In Tongues by Thomas Grattan for its portrait of a queer newcomer in New York’s blue-chip gallery scene. I loved Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel Catalina for its irreverent narrator and her time spent interning at a museum, Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang relishes the prose in Jennifer Savran Kelly’s tale of a book conservator who finds a queer love letter buried in the archives at The Met, and Senior Editor Hakim Bishara embraces his ambivalence toward Rachel Cusk’s portrayals of artists. We hope these stories deepen your relationship with art, whether you create it, write about it, or simply appreciate its impact on your life. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel
Capturing the weight of being an artist and a woman from three perspectives, The Last Sane Woman is an artwork in itself. Hannah Regel’s previous work as a poet shines through in her debut novel’s lyrical prose and cinematic attention to detail. The book tells the story of Nicola, a young artist who finds parallels to her life and frustrations in the archived letters of Donna, a ceramicist who took her own life. The glimpse into the psyches of Nicola, Donna, and Susan, the recipient of Donna’s letters, is both voyeuristically fascinating and relatable as they reveal the women coping with creative blocks, striving for success in the art world, and making (or failing to make) bearable lives. —Natalie Haddad
Buy on Bookshop | Verso Books, July 2024
Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s cacophonous first novel is hard to pin down, which is precisely the point. Its namesake character is a candid, droll narrator who chronicles her senior year at Harvard as she navigates being undocumented. With graduation and an uncertain future looming she privately follows the DREAM Act’s progression. Catalina touches on every aspect of her life: her grandfather’s immigration case, the everyday elitism of Ivy League literary clubs, her romantic relationships, and even an internship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. There, she is assigned the task of cataloging items in the collection, including quipus, knotted record-keeping objects comprised of strands of llama hair. Catalina returns to these throughout the story as they prove significant to various subjects, such as the Spanish colonial forces’ mass murder of quipucamayocs, Inca empire officials who could decipher the knotted devices. The key to the quipus’ codes perished along with them. As she observes the curatorial process behind the museum’s exhibition unfold, she tenderly reflects on what it means for the surviving quipus to refuse to share their secrets, even as they’re put on display.
This refusal to conform carries through the book on both the protagonist’s and the author’s part, and it is what struck me more than anything. Catalina is keenly aware of her own boundaries and keeps much of her internal life private from those around her. Cornejo Villavicencio swims against the tides of stereotypical stories about immigrant children, campus misfits, and undocumented students. Her writing repels platitudes and clichés to chart a much-needed path in fiction, one that allows characters to journey wherever they please. —LA
Buy on Bookshop | One World Books, July 2024
Parade by Rachel Cusk
Every time I drift away from Rachel Cusk’s writing, often finding her portrayal of artists — especially if they’re male — much too clichéd and romanticized for my taste, she pulls me back in with a hair-raising, heart-expanding line. Though not exactly a page-turner like her titillating last novel Second Place (2021), artists and curators will find a lot to identify with in this book, set primarily in the contemporary art world. One of the best authors of our time, Cusk defies the conventions of novel writing, tossing away technicalities of plot, form, and structure to unknot the essence of a feeling — a scarring change of heart, the slow death of love, the long and lonely path back toward the self, and the potential for resurrection through the creation of art. —Hakim Bishara
Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2024
In Tongues by Thomas Grattan
Thomas Grattan’s gay coming-of-age novel about Gordon, a young, handsome transplant from Minnesota to New York’s blue-chip art world, is rich with detail and feeling. While Gordon’s evolution from grocery stock boy to personal assistant-slash-eye candy for an art world power couple may not resonate with all readers, the protagonist’s desire to be desired, and longing to find a place where he belongs, speaks to many of us in our modern, disconnected world. For anyone in the art world, the snappy dialogue and jet-setting may ring both satirical and spot-on, but it’s the poignant ending that most elevates this read. —NH
Buy on Bookshop | MCD Books, May 2024
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
There’s something really sweet and innocent at the core of the first novel by Iranian-American author Kaveh Akbar, who is better known for his poetry, including the strangely wonderful Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017) and Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021). This is mostly the story of Cyrus Shams, a frustrated Indiana-based poet who’s struggling to understand when a death matters, which takes on an added significance when we learn his mother reputedly died in a plane shot down over the Persian Gulf. The ennui of his Midwestern life leads him to travel to the Brooklyn Museum’s solo exhibition of Orkideh, a fictional Iranian contemporary artist who is dying of cancer and inviting visitors to sit and talk with her.
The allusions to Marina Abramović’s viral “The Artist Is Present” performance in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art are clear, but this is deeper and more peculiar, in a way that highlights what Orkideh describes as the Iranian obsession with death and poetry. This brooding artistic persona is a perfect fit for this literary meditation on loss, generational trauma, heritage, and art, while one of the largest themes is about finding a meaningful death. That question looms over not only the book as a whole but Cyrus’s life and relationship to the memory of his late mother.
Akbar’s language is tight and each passage is filled with wry observations and phrases that never suffer from any of the excess that can make stories like this feel self-indulgent. There are clichés galore, including passages with Rumi. But here, Akbar recycles them in a way immigrants and their children often do, making them anew each time. Martyr! is a book for those struggling with understanding addiction, poetry, and death, and love along the way. In other words, this is about life itself and the role art plays in it. —Hrag Vartanian
Buy on Bookshop | Knopf, January 2024
Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly
Just listen to this plot: It’s the early 2000s in New York. Dawn, an aspiring artist and bookbinder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is stuck and doesn’t quite know why. “Because lately I get more pleasure from spreading open the covers of a book than my own legs,” Dawn observes in the opening lines of the book. “Because the pungent smell of ink and the soft touch of paper.” It’s only when she discovers a queer love letter in the endpapers of an old book, sending her on an odyssey to learn about the writer’s identity, that she starts unraveling the answers to her artist’s block and genderqueer identity. Part mystery novel, part Künstlerroman, Endpapers is a book about the art of the journey. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Buy on Bookshop | Algonquin Books, December 2023
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
When actress Sonia Nasir returns to Occupied Palestine for the first time since childhood to visit her sister, she finds herself thrust into a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Palestinian-British writer Isabella Hammad crafts the ensuing story of spectral homecoming, art-making, and theater in the midst of apartheid with sharp prose that highlights the social performance of the everyday under occupation. Sonia, in the throes of a divorce, embodies the role of Gertrude and struggles bitterly with what she sees as a chasm between her and her Palestinian roots, while Israeli authorities increasingly take notice of the acting troupe’s rehearsals. Hammad’s story speaks to the censorship and emotionally fraught process of creating art under a repressive government, making Enter Ghost a poignant read as we continue to witness what experts have deemed a genocide in Palestine. —LA
Buy on Bookshop | Grove Press, April 2023
So Much Blue by Percival Everett
According to Kevin, the painter-narrator of this book, blue is the color “of trust, loyalty, a subject for philosophical discourse, the name of a musical form.” Blue is also the color of secrets — it’s the color of a massive canvas that he has hidden from his wife for nine years. That painting is, in turn, a metonym for secrets embedded in the three different timelines of this book: an affair in Paris in the recent past, the violent events of a trip to El Salvador decades before, and his teenage daughter’s pregnancy in the present. What ties this complex plot together is the crotchety painter’s narration rendered by Everett’s steadfast prose. His snarky and occasionally funny tone will be consummately familiar to anybody who’s met an older male artist: “I do not like charts depicting gradations of colors or hues,” Kevin says at one point. “They tell me nothing.” —LZ
Buy on Bookshop | Graywolf Press, June 2017
