{"id":1865488,"date":"2026-04-02T20:19:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T17:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1865488"},"modified":"2026-04-02T20:19:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T17:19:54","slug":"8-books-were-looking-forward-to-in-april","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1865488","title":{"rendered":"8 Books We\u2019re Looking Forward to in April"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tSpring is here, and new art books and baby bunnies alike are entering the world en masse. Fiction fans can expect a new novel by Ben Lerner, a \u201cmedieval weird\u201d tale story starring Monica Lewinsky, and an unhinged art-world satire imagining Sackler revenge. In nonfiction, look for a memoir from Hans Ulrich Obrist, new books on Dorothea Tanning and Alberto Giacometti, and much more.<\/p>\n
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Transcription<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Ben Lerner<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tOnly Ben Lerner can turn anxious, overthinking, self-deprecating inner monologues into moving and tender tales this effectively, this consistently. Transcription <\/em>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\u2019s supposed to be interviewing his mentor for a magazine. Visiting that mentor\u2019s intimidating, impressive art-filled house, he finds he\u2019s 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\u2019s a portrait of a world where adulthood\u2014where having \u201cfigured it out\u201d\u2014is increasingly understood as a myth. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by Andrew Durbin<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tPeter Hujar\u2019s most famous relationship may be the one he shared with David Wojnarowicz, but this tender dual biography focuses on the photographer\u2019s time with a different paramour: Paul Thek, an artist best known for his meaty, bodily sculptures. Frieze<\/em> 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\u2019s romance acted as a generative force, helping both to bloom as artists and as gay men. \u2014Alex Greenberger<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Kill Dick<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Luke Goebel<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tImagine a novel written in the style of Vice <\/em>magazine. That\u2019s Kill Dick<\/em>, Luke Goebel\u2019s 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\u2014the 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\u2014and creating a transgressive public art installation that puts the Sicklers to shame. This one\u2019s for fans of Luigi Mangione and Nan Goldin, and maybe also Ottessa Moshfegh\u2014Goebel\u2019s wife. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n
[READ A REVIEW HERE]<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Joanna Fiduccia<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThis book, by the Yale art historian Joanna Fiduccia, tackles Giacometti\u2019s most unpopular work\u2014a series of plaster heads he sculpted throughout the 1930s. (When Surrealist figurehead Andr\u00e9 Breton dismissed them by saying \u201cEveryone knows what a head is,\u201d Giacometti memorably replied \u201cNot I.\u201d) 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 \u201cdynamizes our understanding of modernist figuration and its relationship to politics,\u201d as our reviewer Ara H. Merjian writes in a forthcoming piece. The book is a chance to learn more about the artist\u2014and how he might guide us through a new \u201930s\u2014ahead of his monographic museum opening in Paris in 2028. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Dear Monica Lewinsky<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Julia Langbein<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s 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 \u201coffbeat feminist fiction.\u201d 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\u2019s naughty side, Langbein refigures Lewinsky as a martyr, writing prayers to Saint Monica. \u201cMedieval weird,\u201d the author has said, is having a moment, and we\u2019re here for it. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Life in Progress<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Hans Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Watson<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tEarly on in this brief memoir, Hans Ulrich Obrist recounts that, as a child in post-1968 Switzerland, he was fascinated by \u201ccities and people.\u201d Indeed, much of what follows is a catalog of the star curator\u2019s various visitations with great artists, many of whom he met on foreign ground: his studio visits with G\u00fcnther Uecker and with Peter Fischli and David Weiss as a teenager, his conversations with Agn\u00e8s Varda following his rise to fame, his long-term exchange with the painter Etel Adnan. Obrist, who currently leads London\u2019s 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. \u2014Alex Greenberger<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Alice Mahon<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThough all the Surrealists have fascinating biographies (boring, well-adjusted people rarely find themselves making work like that!), Dorthea Tanning\u2019s 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. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Latino New York: Art and Experience, 1970\u20132001<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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By Edward J. Sullivan <\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThis book offers a look at the Latinx art movement from the vantage of someone who helped shape it. Spanning 1970\u2014when the author was in his early 20s\u2014to the turn of the millennium, the book promises to chart the path of Latinx art from New York\u2019s margins to the spotlight in essays where personal and art historical perspectives bleed and blur. It\u2019s 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, Pep\u00f3n Osorio, Cecilia Vicu\u00f1a, and Juan S\u00e1nchez. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/aia_book-collage_.jpg?w=1024″] Spring is here, and new art books and baby bunnies alike are entering the world en masse. Fiction fans can expect a new novel by Ben Lerner, a \u201cmedieval weird\u201d tale story starring Monica Lewinsky, and an unhinged art-world satire imagining Sackler revenge. In nonfiction, look for a memoir from Hans Ulrich […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1865488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1865488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1865488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1865488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1865488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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