Last Fall

On September 11, 2001 Ronald Sukenick was in his Battery Park studio working on a novel about the American "Museum of Temporary Art" when he looked out his window and saw the first of the jets strike the World Trade Center. He then proceeded to reconceive the novel, now entitled Last Fall, having grasped that the "Museum of Temporary Art" was America itself, and its ikon the World Trade Center. In Last Fall an older generation of artists, intellectuals, and arts professionals investigate an art theft, "something missing" from the Museum, but the transience of the collections makes it impossible to identify what's gone. Recovering the work means exposing the secret of the Museum's creation, a conspiracy of the "why" chromosome transforming all the suspects into an American family.

Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004) was on the cutting edge of American fiction and publishing for four decades. Winner of an American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement and the American Academy of Arts and Letters prestigious Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, he was the author of twelve works of fiction and criticism, including 98.6 and Mosaic Man. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review. This was his last book.