Art Is Everything

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xōchitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda's grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she's going to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico.

But then everything starts to fall apart when Xōchitl's biological clock begins beeping, Amanda's father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Triquarterly Books
Published: 01/15/2021
ISBN: 9780810142923
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 11/30/2020
Foreword 12/26/2020