The Wonderful World that Almost Was

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 -- Ben Moser
A dreamy epic that lays bare how two quicksilver talents forged new ways of seeing - and being. Virtuosic in its research, humming with sultry detail, Andrew Durbin's biography thrusts us into the thick of the action, hot on the heels of dual meteors in search of the sublime -- Jeremy Atherton Lin
The secret star of the book is Paul Thek's collaborator, artist Ann Wilson who sees it all. Andrew Durbin does too and has made of these lives and these times a jam-packed poem in prose. It's like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death -- Eileen Miles
A shimmering evocation of radical love, ambition, and loss. This detailed dual biography of elusive artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek... pries open a polite history of twentieth-century art, inserting their tempestuous relationship as a cipher for each artist's trailblazing work and the profound stakes of that creative freedom -- Prudence Peiffer
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 -- Philip Gefter
A deeply original book... Andrew Durbin creates a spellbinding sense of wistful cinematic duration in his twinned account of these two incandescent iconoclasts -- Wayne Koestenbaum