Five Stories for Philip Guston

by Philip Guston (Editor)

Five contemporary writers respond to Guston’s work through imaginative fiction that proves his continual influence on today’s creative culture

In the short story collection Five Stories for Philip Guston, edited by Emmie Francis and Mark Godfrey, contemporary writers Christopher Alessandrini, Ben Okri, Thessaly La Force, Lou Stoppard and Audrey Wollen have created new fiction in conversation with Philip Guston (1913–80) and his painting. Christopher Alessandrini’s queer, drily witty “Maverick Road” brings us to the contemporary environs of Guston’s upstate haven. Ben Okri’s “Bloodymindedness” is a stark portrait of violence and subversion. In “Looking,” Thessaly La Force writes of the lingering power of painting and reputation with a tribute to Guston’s exhibition in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. Lou Stoppard’s courtroom crucible “A Verdict” is a study in Kafkaesque atmosphere. Audrey Wollen works deftly with a kind of Oulipo constraint exercise―Giotto is there, but is Guston himself in “The Line”? Look for him, and he is everywhere.

156 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2024

About the author

"Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects." - wikipedia