Eight Beautiful Books Set in the Art World

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel is set somewhere in South America at a birthday party hosted by the country’s vice president. Rozanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has just finished a mesmerizing performance when a band of terrorists breaks into the house and holds everyone for ransom. Salon calls Bel Canto “a story of passionate, doomed love; of the glory of art; of the triumph of our shared humanity over the forces that divide us.” OTS calls it “the most elegant, meditative hostage-takeover novel ever.”

Intellectually ambitious, electric in its prose, and emotionally satisfying, The Blazing World confronts the joy and fury of Harriet Burden, an artist whose work has long been dismissed and ignored by the male-dominated art world. Longlisted for 2014’s prestigious Man Booker Prize and described by NPR as “complex, astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing,” it is a polyphonic tour de force from one of America’s most fearless writers.

Oscar Wilde’s timeless classic tells the story of Dorian Gray, the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist who is impressed and infatuated with Dorian’s beauty. As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his portrait ages and fades and grows into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world.

Legendary queer poet and novelist Eileen Myles collects her art criticism and travel essays in The Importance of Being Iceland. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau’s Cape Cod walk, working-class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson, as well as opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets.

Johannes Vermeer’s GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING has remained a beautiful enigma for centuries. In her atmospheric novel, Tracy Chevalier imagines the painting’s subject to be a young girl hired by the Vermeer household, whose rise from maid to assistant to model brings with it a world of jealousy, intimacy, and secrets.

Richard Elster is a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war. At the end of his service he retreats to the desert and is joined there by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, and by Elster’s daughter, Jessica—an “otherworldly” woman from New York. The three of them build a tender intimacy, something like a family—then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief. Publishers Weekly writes that Finley is “a middle-aged filmmaker who, in the words of his estranged wife, is too serious about art but not serious enough about life.”

Leanne Shapton, formerly the illustrations editor at The New York Times, has written a beautiful, fragmented, meditative memoir in Swimming Studies. From her training for the Olympic trials as a teenager to enjoying pools and beaches around the world as an adult, Leanne Shapton offers a fascinating glimpse into the private, often solitary, realm of swimming. Her spare and elegant writing reveals an intimate narrative of suburban adolescence, spent underwater in a discipline that continues to inspire Shapton’s work as an artist and author. To read more about Swimming Studies, here's our review.

An ambitious literary novel set in Rome, New York, and the desert of the American West in the late 1970s, The Flamethrowers captures the idealism and hypocrisy of art, politics, and violence. A National Book Award finalist and selected as one of the ten best books of 2013 by The New York Times, it confirmed Rachel Kushner’s emerging reputation as a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.