Xochitl Gonzalez pulls no punches against the art world in her latest propulsive novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. In the follow-up to her best-selling 2022 debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, Gonzalez explores how legacy gets warped over time. The novel follows the lives of Anita de Monte, an up-and-coming artist in 1985, and Raquel Toro, a third-year art history student at Brown University in 1998. Anita—loosely inspired by real-life Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta—is the rising star of the New York City art scene; that is, until she falls out of a window after a fight with her husband, the minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. Raquel, meanwhile, in search of her thesis subject, rediscovers Anita’s story and the cracks in how it’s been told. As she navigates class, misogyny, and race in an Ivy-league setting, Raquel sets out on a journey to uncover what really happened to the prolific artist.
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