"In a time of ironic detachment, Margaux Williamson is a painter of extreme candor, but the violence of her vision is cut with wonder and love. Sometimes she recalls Phillip Guston, sometimes she's like a Pittsburgh-born van Gogh; usually she reminds me of nobody at all. Seeing as she sees feels like waking up."—Ben Lerner From the artist the called "one of the best artists of her generation," and whose 2010 movie was praised by the likes of James Franco and William Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, comes a breakthrough work for a world where the image of a painting on one's desktop is as real as the painting hanging in the gallery. Margaux Williamson has conceived of a place that never existed, called The Road at the Top of the World Museum, located in the far north, and populated it with her most accomplished paintings yet. With essays by Chris Kraus, Leanne Shapton, David Balzer, and Mark Greif, and reproductions of eighty paintings, this, her first book, transcends the boundary between the authentic and the imaginary, and collapses the distinction between art show, museum catalog, and document of something astonishing that never was. was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. She's co-author of the cultural criticism website .