Starting in the 1960s and up until his death from AIDS in 1988, sculptor and installation artist Paul Thek used ephemeral materials to challenge the virtuosities of the New York art world. In Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek, V.H. Wildman engages with Thek's life and work in angular prose that mirrors the artist’s explorations of time and subjectivity. Taking its title from one of Thek’s artworks, a plexiglas box of personal artifacts—cigarette butts, postcards, seashells, ticket stubs—Wildman's mythobiographical novel collects wisps and detritus of a life and world caught in a moment of creation.
Fall 2026
Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek
V.H. Wildman
“Wildman has found a way of making us aware of the complex mix of closeness, distance, and limits that characterizes the relation of writer and subject…Shrine is an extraordinary book that fuses documentation and fiction in an unusual homage to an unusual artist.”
V. H. Wildman is a writer, critic, teacher and editor. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Brown University and an MA in philosophy, with a concentration in aesthetics, from the University of Miami. His writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Encyclopedia Project, and Hyperallergic. He is also the recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. He writes about books, art, philosophy and culture at Marginal American Notes (found on Substack or Instagram).