A Review of Picture Books (Imprint)

In 2021, Gagosian Publishing, an arm of the influential Gagosian galleries, launched an imprint called Picture Books, conceived by writer Emma Cline with designer Peter Mendelsund, in order to publish fiction by “leading authors,” accompanied by work from “celebrated contemporary artists.” The hardcover books, beautifully produced, share a trim size and a minimalist, series look. Each has a pocket on its inside front cover, and in each pocket waits a folded poster of the visual work. 

As a set, they feel eminently collectible. The first two titles in the series, from 2021, pair Ottessa Moshfegh’s story “My New Novel” with the down payment, an oil-on-linen piece by painter and musician Issy Wood; and Percival Everett’s novella-­length “Grand Canyon, Inc.” with Untitled (Original Cowboy), a photograph by artist Richard Prince. Gagosian states that the project will give an artist “carte blanche to create an image that is in conversation with the writer’s story,” which makes it sound as though the point is to explore the possibilities of reverse ekphrasis (when an artist responds to a text with new visual work), though this doesn’t entirely bear out. While Wood’s painting was created in response to Moshfegh’s text, Prince’s piece is from the artist’s 2013 Original Cowboy series. It’s a large-scale photograph of sandstone buttes on the Utah–Arizona border. Everett’s story, meanwhile, follows a man who grows up in Iowa obsessed with guns, gets rich leading big-game hunts in Kenya for assorted international assholes, then returns to the United States and buys the Grand Canyon. As Gagosian’s website argues, both Everett and Prince are “tricksters” known for playing with mythologies of the American West, so it seems what’s been paired are two careers; the pairing feels conceptual. The Moshfegh-Wood combo, on the other hand, feels more like a conversation between one specific image and one specific text. Wood’s piece works as a kind of grotesque psychological mirror for Moshfegh’s story about a failed writer living in LA. A sign that the pairing works: the text kept sending me back to the image, and the image kept returning me to the text. Both Moshfegh’s and Everett’s stories center loathsome and/or pathetic white American men, and so does Sam Lipsyte’s novella-length “Friend of the Pod”—the 2022 addition to the series. Lipsyte’s story gives us a middle-aged Gen X-er living in New York City who goes to work for an obnoxious boomer in...