Stephanie Wambugu & Thelma Golden s+2
at McNally Jackson s+6

Join us for the paperback launch of Lonely Crowds.

Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.

While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.

Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

Stephanie Wambugu is a novelist and essayist. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, the winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the VCU First Novelist Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize. Her first novel Lonely Crowds was published by Little, Brown and Company in the United States, Canongate in the United Kingdom and Éditions Albin Michel in France. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in frieze, Granta, Bookforum, The Nation, The Drift and elsewhere. She attended Bard College and studied fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives and works in New York.

Thelma Golden is the Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual arts by artists of African descent. She began her career in 1987 as a fellow at the Studio Museum, then joined the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. Golden returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as the Deputy Director for exhibitions and programs and was named the Director and Chief Curator in 2005. Under her leadership, the Studio Museum has gained renown as a global leader in the exhibition of contemporary art and a cultural anchor in the Harlem community. Now in her 26th year at the Museum, she is ushering in a new era for the institution with the completion of its first-ever purpose-built facility in its over 50-year history, which opened to the public in November 2025. Golden serves on the board of directors for the Barack Obama Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2024, Golden was awarded the W.E.B. DuBois Medal by Harvard University and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She was also listed in Time Magazine’s TIME100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2023, Golden was the first curator to be awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. She holds a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Smith College. She has received honorary degrees from Barnard College, the City College of New York, Columbia University, Moore College of Art and Design, San Francisco Art Institute, and Smith College. Golden was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Obama in 2010. She is a recognized authority on contemporary art by artists of African descent and an active lecturer and panelist who speaks about art and culture at national and international institutions.