The Correspondence Artist will be reissued with an original introduction by Garth Greenwell in January 2027.

*Lambda Literary Award Winner

“Browning likes a bit of contrived mischief…. It’s tempting to compare her to popular writers of ‘autofiction,’ such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner—all of whom she mentions in her work—but Browning exaggerates the genre to particularly postmodern, batty, and charming extremes.”
—Alice Gregory, The New Yorker

Synopsis

An innovative, globe-trotting, and sexy tale of modern connection and desire.

Compared by The New Yorker to the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner, this roman à clef is a love story like none other.

Vivian, a writer, is carrying on a relationship with an internationally acclaimed artist. There are those who stand to benefit—and suffer—from the revelation of her paramour's identity, so in the service of telling her tale she creates a series of fictional stand-ins. There is Tzipi, a sixty-eight-year-old Nobel Prize-winning female Israeli writer; Binh, a twenty-something Vietnamese video artist; Santuxto, a poetic Basque separatist; and Djeli, a Malian world-music star.

Vivian divulges the story of their relationship largely through correspondence, from the first meeting with her lover to their jumpy spam filter, which arrests the more explicit notes that result in Vivian being held captive in a tiger cage in a Berlin hotel in one version; chased by a Medusa-like woman on a Greek Island in another; imprisoned by a splinter cell of Basque separatists; in an African hospital with a bout of Dengue Fever.

“Browning likes a bit of contrived mischief,” praises The New Yorker, and The Correspondence Artist delivers an epistolary romance with captivating wit and intelligence.

The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning =

* In most cases, none of these writers endorse this book. Our math formulas are supposed to be amusing anecdotes, similar to shelf-talkers in bookstores that say "If you like X, you might enjoy Y," or "This Book is like Cormac McCarthy writing an episode of Saved by the Bell with a soundtrack by Philip Glass."

"A deft look at modern life that's both witty and devastating."
—Nylon

"Intelligent... a pleasure to read."
—Bookslut

"Barbara Browning’s The Correspondence Artist applies stylistic juxtapositions in welcome and unexpected ways. This novel... is experimental in structure yet casual in tone. It’s an extended metaphor of a book that nonetheless abounds with insider details, art-world cameos, and precise images—even resorting to the occasional still frame to etch a particular scene onto the mind of the reader."
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"A truly 21st-century novel! The Correspondence Artist answers the question: what happens to epistolary romance in the age of digital communication? Love—the remix—and the remix—and the remix..."
—Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

View the awesome HORN! REVIEWS review in short graphic novel/comic form.
—The Rumpus

"Only a New York University Performance Studies professor can write a novel about a love affair narrated via email, using four different avatars to protect the identity of a famous unnamed artist, that include a Basque separatist, an Israeli novelist, a Malian musician, and a Vietnamese multimedia artist, and pull it off [in a] comedic, intelligent book."
—Slice Magazine

"This novel of an affair told prismatically is a love letter to letters, a passionate mixtape to the world of culture."
—The Rumpus

"Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist has a conceit that will sound like a dog whistle to readers hungry for a certain kind of high-concept writing. The particular details of these relationships... are sharp, witty, and well-developed: I experienced that nerdy thrill novel reading sometimes gives you when you learn something new... I'm interested in what a Malian musician would have to say to his Lacanian therapist, and the micro-history of ETA we get tickles me the way that getting another strange stamp in your passport might."
—The Collagist

"Jam-packed with cultural references and lubricated body parts... in a fiction that merges with cultural theory. This is mail worth rifling through."
—The Fanzine 

"The Correspondence Artist is a thoroughly enjoying read that raises many questions through its fresh sense of storytelling. This book is worth reading if, for nothing else, than for pure enjoyment of the author's ability to execute a well-told tale."
—jmww 

"Browning's writing is truly sexy. Playful and evocative, it captures the obsessive nature of love in a way few authors manage. The Correspondence Artist is a smartly complex and surprising work of art. More than being simply a 'novel' in the traditional sense it takes that term a step further, existing in form as something truly innovative and new. Part memoir, part fiction, part epistolary, part metadata-existentialist philosophy, part art installation; the sum total is a triumph of a debut."
—KGB Bar Lit Magazine 

"[The Correspondence Artist] is wrapped up in powerful feelings of disconnect, confusion, and sexual need. Imagining a failed romance through four different characters [gives] the story an unusual liveliness, and Browning expertly filters critical moments through each imagined lover."
—Washington City Paper 

"Browning relentlessly explores her theme of love's many faces, giving readers a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns sexy, humorous, and insightful."
—Publishers Weekly

"The Correspondence Artist is smart, funny, sexy, knowledgeable, subtle, disturbing, light-hearted, obsessive, and tragic: a comedy that, I surmise, is wholly confessional and wholly imaginary."
—Harry Mathews

Barbara Browning has a PhD in comparative literature from Yale. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village. She is also the author of I'm Trying to Reach You, a Believer Book Award Finalist.

A Communiqué from the Arrano Beltza from The Correspondence Artist's Santutxo Etxeberria ("I would like to esclarify one thing..."):

Enjoy a sneak peek read of The Correspondence Artist here, on Issuu:

LIST PRICE: $16.00
PAGES: 192
PRINT ISBN: 978-0-9820151-9-3
DIGITAL ISBN: 978-0-9832471-2-8
RELEASE DATE: 3/1/2011

Original printing was printed with the following environmental statement:
*Mix paper from responsible sources, FSC certified paper.