Spring’s Art-Book Season Brings Ben Lerner, Hujar and Thek, and a New Giacometti Study
Spring publishing has arrived with a familiar mix of reinvention and return: novels that use the art world as both setting and pressure chamber, and nonfiction that revisits 20th-century figures with fresh archival and political attention. Among the season’s notable releases are a new work of fiction by American novelist Ben Lerner, a dual biography of photographer Peter Hujar and artist Paul Thek, and an academic study that reconsiders a little-loved body of work by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966).
Lerner’s “Transcription” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) opens with a small, contemporary catastrophe: a narrator navigating a day without a phone after dropping it into a sink. The premise quickly becomes a social and professional trap. He is meant to interview a mentor for a magazine, but arrives at the mentor’s art-filled home without a recording device and, too embarrassed to admit the mistake, improvises an increasingly elaborate workaround. The novel’s comedy of manners turns sharper as the narrator’s humiliation surfaces at a dinner at Museo Reina Sofia, and the story begins to blur the boundaries between parent and child, teacher and student, competence and performance. In Lerner’s hands, adulthood is less a stable destination than a story people tell themselves.
A different kind of intimacy anchors “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Andrew Durbin. Rather than centering Hujar’s widely discussed relationship with David Wojnarowicz, Durbin traces the photographer’s earlier bond with Thek, the American artist known for visceral, bodily sculptures. The book follows their connection from the 1950s through the 1970s, charting how friendship tipped into romance and how that relationship functioned as a creative engine for both men. The narrative is also shadowed by the era’s losses: both Hujar and Thek later died of AIDS-related causes, a fact that lends the biography an elegiac undertone without reducing it to tragedy.
For readers drawn to art-world fiction with a sharper edge, Luke Goebel’s debut novel “Kill Dick” (Red Hen Press) imagines a bicoastal satire fueled by grievance, privilege, and spectacle. The story is told from the perspective of an NYU art school dropout who despises her father, a lawyer for Dick Sickler, a thinly veiled Sackler patriarch. In Goebel’s setup, rebellion takes a deliberately self-destructive turn: the protagonist becomes addicted to OxyContin and channels her rage into a transgressive public art installation designed to shame the Sicklers. The novel positions itself in the wake of activist art and institutional critique, using the language of contemporary media and art-scene posturing to push its revenge fantasy into uncomfortable territory.
On the scholarly side, Joanna Fiduccia’s “Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism” (Yale University Press) turns attention to a body of work Giacometti made in the 1930s: a series of plaster heads that have often been treated as an awkward detour between his Surrealist period and the attenuated figures that later defined his reputation. Fiduccia argues that these heads are not an interlude but a pivot point, reframing the decade’s formal questions as inseparable from politics and the myths nations tell about themselves. The book also revisits a famous exchange with Surrealist leader André Breton, who dismissed the heads with “Everyone knows what a head is,” to which Giacometti replied, “Not I.”
Together, these titles sketch a season in which the art world appears less as a glamorous backdrop than as a site where power, mentorship, desire, and ideology are tested in public. Whether through Lerner’s anxious social choreography, Durbin’s tender reconstruction of a partnership, Goebel’s scorched satire, or Fiduccia’s political rereading of form, the spring list suggests that art books remain one of the most revealing ways to watch culture think out loud.
