The first single-author book to be published by Paper Monument, Raphael Rubinstein's The Miraculous presents the artistic avant-gardes of the last five decades as a tapestry of incidents as fascinating and unlikely as any collection of myths or legends. Thinking more of Kafka's Parables than Vasari's Lives of the Artists, Rubinstein composes a series of micro-narratives celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call "contemporary art." Featuring writing on fifty artists.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose numerous books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions), The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now) and The Miraculous (Paper Monument). He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions). The Miraculous has been translated into French by Marcel Cohen and published by Editions Greges. From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. He is currently professor of critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.