Tom Friedman is an unusual young American sculptor who produces quirky yet beautiful sculptures out of household objects - pencils, plastic cups, laundry detergent, paper straws. Featured in cream and in a one-person presentation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Friedman has quickly gained an impressive following of some of the most attentive and influential contemporary art-watchers in the United States. This is art which raises questions about the making and seeing of art, about the pleasures of small transformations producing sudden beauty. This book will coincide with Friedman's first major American museum tour, to be held in 2000-2002.American art critic Bruce Hainley examines the artist's work as a kind of giant self-portrait. Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper discusses with the artist such unexpected influences as contemporary electronic music. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle looks at the artist's work Untitled, 1993 - a ring of plastic cups in a home-made Minimalist tradition. The Artist's Choices are The Dinner Party (1919) by Swiss writer Robert Walser, and the glossary to Info-Psychology (1975-76) by Timothy Leary, the cult psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs. Facsimiles of the artist's notebooks and text works are published alongside an important interview by curator Robert Storr.

Bruce Hainley is a Los Angeles-based art critic and contributing editor to Artforum, Spin and Frieze. He teaches at the Graduate Fine Arts Program, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.

Dennis Cooper, a novelist and critic, is a Contributing Editor to Artforum. He has published a number of novels, including Frisk (1991), as well as The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969-93.

Adrian Searle is Chief Art Critic at the Guardian and a regular contributor to the El Cultural supplement of El Mundo, as well as an occasional writer of fiction. He has curated exhibitions for the Hayward Gallery, London, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Reina Sofia, Madrid.