{"product_id":"the-wonderful-world-that-almost-was-a-life-of-peter-hujar-and-paul-thek-by-andrew-durbin","title":"The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek by Andrew Durbin","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSurrounded 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAndrew Durbin’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Wonderful World That Almost Was\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eAndrew Durbin\u003c\/b\u003e is the editor in chief of \u003ci\u003efrieze \u003c\/i\u003emagazine. He is the author of the novels \u003ci\u003eMacArthur Park\u003c\/i\u003e, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and \u003ci\u003eSkyland\u003c\/i\u003e, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian’s posthumous work \u003ci\u003eFascination\u003c\/i\u003e. His writing has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books, \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books, The Believer, \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e online, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. He lives in London.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Womb House Books ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52783193489717,"sku":null,"price":36.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0965\/6247\/9413\/files\/wonderful.jpg?v=1777048885","url":"https:\/\/wombhousebooks.com\/products\/the-wonderful-world-that-almost-was-a-life-of-peter-hujar-and-paul-thek-by-andrew-durbin","provider":"Womb House Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}