On Art (Novels)

Comic and tragic chronicles and epiphanies paint unconventional portraits of artists and art enthusiasts in this collection of six delightfully inventive novels. This collection contains: Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci: How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop-skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner: In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau: Blending digital fever dream and hard-boiled noir in bursts of claustrophobic prose, Pink Mountain on Locust Island follows a teenager and her maybe-boyfriend into the seedy corners of the art world. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber: A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.  Search History by Eugene Lim: Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire. The Gift by Barbara Browning: A sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophically sad story of performance art, ukuleles, dance, and our attempts and failures to make contact.