The Wonderful World that Almost Was (2026)
FSG (US) / Granta (UK)
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FSG (US) / Granta (UK)
The cinematic, never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art.
When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever.
Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.
Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.
PRESS
When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever.
Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.
Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.
PRESS
I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography I’d describe as tender before. Is that because this one’s about a relationship, coming and going in a world full of change and detail, travel, and being both unmoored and ecstatic? This book is totally about the failure of love and revolutions and how our presence in and out and around those states is how we know we’re alive. The secret star of the book is Paul Thek’s collaborator, artist Ann Wilson who sees it all. Andrew Durbin does too and has made of these lives and these times a jam-packed poem in prose. It’s like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death.
A deeply original book, saturated with melancholy longing for a historical moment (past and future) when art and love could come together with a synchronized, quicksilver suddenness. Andrew Durbin creates a spellbinding sense of wistful cinematic duration in his twinned account of these two incandescent iconoclasts.
This is a great American love story that is also an indispensable account of the growth and emergence of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek as influential artists.
This high-concept dual biography is at once ambitious, authoritative and insightful; that it also resonates on the page like a tasty novel is Andrew Durbin's inspired gift to the reader. He writes knowingly about the ache of romantic longing, the urgency to make an enduring art, the many ways Hujar and Thek embodied the culture of their time as it bubbled up from the streets to become, finally, legendary artists of an era.
An era long lost becomes vividly tangible in these pages. Surprisingly relevant for today, the two protagonists' paths through the 1950s and 60s pre-Stonewall times shine up in ways I had never been able to grasp before. Andrew Durbin turns his almost forensic research into a seriously entertaining read.
Like an archaeologist sifting through the plastic rubble of the recent past, Andrew Durbin has peeled back layers and layers to reveal two artists once dismissed as 'footnotes,' restoring them and their lost world to a central place in our history. As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul—and Durbin—offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being.
Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, devastatingly undervalued during their lifetimes, met as they began ground-breaking art careers that are only now attracting huzzahs and serious study. Theirs was a liberating lovership friendship until the connection cracked behind Thek’s restlessness and Hujar’s prickliness. Vivid and richly detailed, this biography of their relationship also evokes the texture of bohemian life in the Sixties, both the struggles and the seemingly endless possibilities.
From the cliffs of Ponza to the piers of Manhattan, Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was is a shimmering evocation of radical love, ambition, and loss. This detailed dual biography of elusive artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—with strong supporting cameos from Sheyla Baykal, Linda Rosenkrantz, Susan Sontag, and Ann Wilson—pries open a polite history of twentieth-century art, inserting their tempestuous relationship as a cipher for each artist’s trailblazing work and the profound stakes of that creative freedom.
In his lifetime, photographer-flaneur Peter Hujar was overlooked and under-recognized. Not by his downtown bohemian friends—Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz—but by the art-going public. Yet he understood sexual glamour as well as Richard Avedon; psychic damage as well as Diane Arbus; and seedy spectacle as well as Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic Peter Schjeldahl placed him at the “historic crossroads of high art and low life in the late twentieth century.” Where anyone who knows what’s what wants to be. And where we get to be thanks to Andrew Durbin’s masterful double portrait (of Hujar and his lover, artist Peter Thek), a work that is as aesthetically ferocious as it is historically erudite.
—Eileen Myles
A deeply original book, saturated with melancholy longing for a historical moment (past and future) when art and love could come together with a synchronized, quicksilver suddenness. Andrew Durbin creates a spellbinding sense of wistful cinematic duration in his twinned account of these two incandescent iconoclasts.
—Wayne Koestenbaum
This is a great American love story that is also an indispensable account of the growth and emergence of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek as influential artists.
—Colm Tóibín
This high-concept dual biography is at once ambitious, authoritative and insightful; that it also resonates on the page like a tasty novel is Andrew Durbin's inspired gift to the reader. He writes knowingly about the ache of romantic longing, the urgency to make an enduring art, the many ways Hujar and Thek embodied the culture of their time as it bubbled up from the streets to become, finally, legendary artists of an era.
—Philip Gefter
An era long lost becomes vividly tangible in these pages. Surprisingly relevant for today, the two protagonists' paths through the 1950s and 60s pre-Stonewall times shine up in ways I had never been able to grasp before. Andrew Durbin turns his almost forensic research into a seriously entertaining read.
—Wolfgang Tillmans
Like an archaeologist sifting through the plastic rubble of the recent past, Andrew Durbin has peeled back layers and layers to reveal two artists once dismissed as 'footnotes,' restoring them and their lost world to a central place in our history. As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul—and Durbin—offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being.
—Benjamin Moser
Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, devastatingly undervalued during their lifetimes, met as they began ground-breaking art careers that are only now attracting huzzahs and serious study. Theirs was a liberating lovership friendship until the connection cracked behind Thek’s restlessness and Hujar’s prickliness. Vivid and richly detailed, this biography of their relationship also evokes the texture of bohemian life in the Sixties, both the struggles and the seemingly endless possibilities.
—Cynthia Carr
From the cliffs of Ponza to the piers of Manhattan, Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was is a shimmering evocation of radical love, ambition, and loss. This detailed dual biography of elusive artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—with strong supporting cameos from Sheyla Baykal, Linda Rosenkrantz, Susan Sontag, and Ann Wilson—pries open a polite history of twentieth-century art, inserting their tempestuous relationship as a cipher for each artist’s trailblazing work and the profound stakes of that creative freedom.
—Prudence Peiffer
In his lifetime, photographer-flaneur Peter Hujar was overlooked and under-recognized. Not by his downtown bohemian friends—Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz—but by the art-going public. Yet he understood sexual glamour as well as Richard Avedon; psychic damage as well as Diane Arbus; and seedy spectacle as well as Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic Peter Schjeldahl placed him at the “historic crossroads of high art and low life in the late twentieth century.” Where anyone who knows what’s what wants to be. And where we get to be thanks to Andrew Durbin’s masterful double portrait (of Hujar and his lover, artist Peter Thek), a work that is as aesthetically ferocious as it is historically erudite.
—Lili Anolik