8 Books We’re Looking Forward to in April

By Ben Lerner

Only Ben Lerner can turn anxious, overthinking, self-deprecating inner monologues into moving and tender tales this effectively, this consistently. Transcription starts as a detailed day of navigating the world without a phone. Our narrator has dropped his phone into the sink (and NOT the toilet!), but he’s supposed to be interviewing his mentor for a magazine. Visiting that mentor’s intimidating, impressive art-filled house, he finds he’s too embarrassed to confess his clumsy mistake. So he arrives without a recording device and gets caught in an elaborate workaround, acting childish. His humiliating flop is outed at a Museo Reina Sofia dinner, and as the story unfolds, parent-child and mentor-mentee relationships of all kinds blur. It’s a portrait of a world where adulthood—where having “figured it out”—is increasingly understood as a myth. —Emily Watlington

by Andrew Durbin

Peter Hujar’s most famous relationship may be the one he shared with David Wojnarowicz, but this tender dual biography focuses on the photographer’s time with a different paramour: Paul Thek, an artist best known for his meaty, bodily sculptures. Frieze editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin charts how their friendship eventually tipped over into something more between the 1950s and the 1970s, well before both artists died of AIDS-related causes. More than simply a study of two creatives in love, the book shows how Hujar and Thek’s romance acted as a generative force, helping both to bloom as artists and as gay men. —Alex Greenberger

By Luke Goebel

Imagine a novel written in the style of Vice magazine. That’s Kill Dick, Luke Goebel’s debut. This unhinged work of bicoastal art world satire imagines Sackler-family revenge from the vantage of an NYU art school dropout who hates her dad—the lawyer for Dick Sickler (a thinly veiled Sackler patriarch) personally responsible for helping the opioid dealer get away with mass murder. How does a rich girl rebel against a dad like that? By getting addicted to Oxycontin, naturally—and creating a transgressive public art installation that puts the Sicklers to shame. This one’s for fans of Luigi Mangione and Nan Goldin, and maybe also Ottessa Moshfegh—Goebel’s wife. —Emily Watlington

[READ A REVIEW HERE]

By Joanna Fiduccia

This book, by the Yale art historian Joanna Fiduccia, tackles Giacometti’s most unpopular work—a series of plaster heads he sculpted throughout the 1930s. (When Surrealist figurehead André Breton dismissed them by saying “Everyone knows what a head is,” Giacometti memorably replied “Not I.”) Giacometti had been a Surrealist before creating his best-known work, those spindly figures; these heads are part of what happened in between. Fiduccia frames this lesser known period not as an interlude, but a fulcrum in a book that “dynamizes our understanding of modernist figuration and its relationship to politics,” as our reviewer Ara H. Merjian writes in a forthcoming piece. The book is a chance to learn more about the artist—and how he might guide us through a new ’30s—ahead of his monographic museum opening in Paris in 2028. —Emily Watlington

By Julia Langbein

It’s not every day an art historian pens a book about Monica Lewinsky. But Julia Langbein is also a standup comedian. Mix together a little art history, a little Monica, a little medievalism, and a little comedy, and you get a book billed as “offbeat feminist fiction.” It stars a 40-something protagonist facing flashbacks to a semester abroad with a handsy professor, a man who altered the course of her life. That semester took place in 1998, just as Monica Lewinsky was going through something similar, albeit with a horny president. Inspired by Medieval Christianity’s naughty side, Langbein refigures Lewinsky as a martyr, writing prayers to Saint Monica. “Medieval weird,” the author has said, is having a moment, and we’re here for it. —Emily Watlington

By Hans Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Watson

Early on in this brief memoir, Hans Ulrich Obrist recounts that, as a child in post-1968 Switzerland, he was fascinated by “cities and people.” Indeed, much of what follows is a catalog of the star curator’s various visitations with great artists, many of whom he met on foreign ground: his studio visits with Günther Uecker and with Peter Fischli and David Weiss as a teenager, his conversations with Agnès Varda following his rise to fame, his long-term exchange with the painter Etel Adnan. Obrist, who currently leads London’s Serpentine Galleries, helped redefine his profession, and his latest book posits that curators remain essential because they are the great people connectors of the art world. —Alex Greenberger

By Alice Mahon

Though all the Surrealists have fascinating biographies (boring, well-adjusted people rarely find themselves making work like that!), Dorthea Tanning’s story has its ways of standing apart. She was a woman, a Midwesterner, and a wife of Max Ernst (they fell in love, it is said, over a game of chess). This book weaves between her life and her unforgettable art. —Emily Watlington

By Edward J. Sullivan

This book offers a look at the Latinx art movement from the vantage of someone who helped shape it. Spanning 1970—when the author was in his early 20s—to the turn of the millennium, the book promises to chart the path of Latinx art from New York’s margins to the spotlight in essays where personal and art historical perspectives bleed and blur. It’s also a portrait of what it means to be a critic and simultaneously, part of a community. Sullivan, an art historian at NYU, features encounters with artists like Carmen Herrera, Pepón Osorio, Cecilia Vicuña, and Juan Sánchez. —Emily Watlington