Artists Who Kill & Other Essays on Art
Alexander Theroux
Cover illustration by Edward Gorey
June 22, 2023
ISBN 9798218173494 / Hardcover / 670 pages / $34.99
ISBN 9798218173432 / Paperback / 670 pages / $27.99

Alexander Theroux's first book of essays, rich in lore and personal anecdote, opens an entirely new way of viewing art. One of America's most illustrious writers—twice nominated for the National Book Award—the distinguished novelist and poet brings us this major compilation on the subject of writing—virtually operatic in scope and encyclopedic in historical detail. The result is a gripping, fact-filled, intoxicating panoply of twenty-three seminal pieces about artists driven to extremes, about aesthetic paradoxes and painterly blunders, about blind painters, soft art, and the strange private fascinations with painting harbored by figures from film, politics, and the stage. His essay "Magpies," about the fanatical extremes of collecting, is a taxonomic masterpiece.

We encounter in these pages no end of celebrated, and controversial, geniuses and creators, from the likes of Raphael to the illustrator R. Crumb, from Jan Vermeer to Maurice Sendak, from Botticelli and his model Simonetta Vespucci to Charles Schultz of Peanuts fame, from the naivety of Ralph Cahoon to the genius of Fritz Eichenberg, and from the nonpareil of wood engravers to the many world masters fixated on painting black canvases.

Entertaining and readable, scintillating and quick-witted, Theroux's book lands with immediacy, compassion, and memorable insights that resonate with universal appeal.