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.
native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl.
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 Xochitl'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.
About author(s): YXTA MAYA MURRAY is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles.
Her novels include The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Kidnapped , The King's Gold: An Old World Novel of Adventure , and The Queen Jade: A Novel .
Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares , the Georgia Review , the Southern Review , and the Los Angeles Review of Books .
She has won a Whiting Writer's Award and an Art Writer's Grant, and she has been a finalist for the ASME Award in Fiction.
Her art criticism can be found in Artforum , ARTnews , Artillery , and other periodicals.
| Control | Amandas grumpy father is living peacefully in |
|---|---|
| About author(s) | Yxta |
| Gold | An |
| Jade | A |
Triquarterly Books Art is everything, paperback/yxta maya murray
