Daniel Felsenthal:
Brainard’s trove of letters leads him down from Mount Olympus on a staircase of his own words. Love, Joe reveals a man who had faults, as well as desires that could be pragmatic and unsurprisingly ambitious.
Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis:
Friendship itself may have been the artist and writer Joe Brainard's most important medium. This delightful collection, expertly curated and framed by Daniel Kane, offers an irresistible portrait of not only Brainard's own amiable aesthetic but also the entire queer artistic milieu his galvanizing and optimistic presence helped make possible. Again and again, these letters demonstrate Brainard's surprising intelligence and insight, his rare combination of ambition and humility, and his compassionate embrace of his own imperfect life. Readers are sure to find a new appreciation of why everyone seemed to love Joe.
Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition:
Sometimes published correspondence is uncomfortably revealing, but Joe Brainard's shows that he actually was kind, sweet, funny, generous, humble, intuitive, brilliant, and openhearted. The book's deft editing strategy, which clusters his letters to one friend at a time, shows all sides of his personality. Some friends are great for gossip; others get to the core of his art. At no time is he ever less than engaging. This is a rare compilation of letters you will read from one end to the other.
Deborah Solomon, author of Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell:
We all know that Joe Brainard was a great artist, but fewer know that he possessed an exceptional talent for friendship. He kept up with a wide circle of brilliant pals. The letters gathered here, like his art, are intimate, newsy, affectionate, homoerotic, hilarious, and addictive, and they offer a fascinating portrait of a kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who became a prince of the New York art world.
Lydia Davis, author of Our Strangers: Stories:
I read Love, Joe with great pleasure. A vibrant portrait of Brainard—charming, passionate, frank, antiheroic—emerges from these letters as we follow his artistic development and at the same time enter his social and cultural world, peopled by artists and writers formative not only to Brainard’s times but also to our own. Utterly engrossing.
Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend:
Readers of Joe Brainard’s masterpiece I Remember wish they could have known him, and this book is the next best thing. Here is the same sharp, funny, openhearted, and utterly authentic Joe, in letters brimming with original insights about art, culture and creativity, love and friendship, and the simple but profound joys of everyday life.
Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover:
Joe Brainard was the sweetest person I've ever known, and that sweetness radiates from these letters, which are also an essential record of New York's painters and poets from the 1960s to the 1990s. Famous for his writing in I Remember and for his thousands of beautiful collages, Joe was a passionate, original spirit, gifted with a serious naiveté.
In these letters, you feel the force of a person fully met.
