Critical Fictions is a quarterly book club for the Rabkin Foundation’s community of arts writers. We read and discuss novels and short fiction that do double duty as new and innovative forms of art writing and criticism. In addition to sharing the pleasures of reading and a longstanding fascination with novels about art, we plan to explore some of the following questions together: What does fiction bring to the field of art writing? How do novels function as art criticism, formal analysis, or ekphrasis? What can creative writers get away with that working critics cannot, and what might we learn from them? What are novelists doing when they invent artists who never existed, and what kinds of limitations are superseded when they imagine the works of those artists into being?

We gather four times a year via Zoom, beginning in January 2027. Critical Fictions is organized and hosted by Rabkin Prize winners Lori Waxman and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. Our reading list will be decided together in advance of our first meeting. To register your interest in joining the book club, please complete the form below.

Note to participants: Meeting times are Eastern.

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