The Wonderful World That Almost Was - by Andrew Durbin (Hardcover)

About the Book

"With skill and sensitivity, Andrew Durbin unravels, for the first time, the intertwined lives of the norm-shattering artists and queer icons Peter Hujar and Paul Thek"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul--and Durbin--offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being." --Benjamin Moser, author of Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The cinematic, never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art.

When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he'd found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation--an entanglement that changed American art forever.

Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar's profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation--from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.

Andrew Durbin's The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin's book is an ode to a lost but still-living world--and two men who defined it.

Review Quotes

"Like an archaeologist sifting through the plastic rubble of the recent past, Andrew Durbin has peeled back layers and layers to reveal two artists once dismissed as 'footnotes, ' restoring them and their lost world to a central place in our history. As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul--and Durbin--offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being." --Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World and Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work

"This high-concept dual biography is at once ambitious, authoritative and insightful; that it also resonates on the page like a tasty novel is Andrew Durbin's inspired gift to the reader. He writes knowingly about the ache of romantic longing, the urgency to make an enduring art, the many ways Hujar and Thek embodied the culture of their time as it bubbled up from the streets to become, finally, legendary artists of an era." --Philip Gefter, author of Cocktails with George and Martha and What Becomes a Legend Most

About the Author

Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. He is the author of the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian's posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London.