Over the past several years, electronic communications have had a transformative effect on the public discourse on contemporary art by removing temporal and geographical barriers to the flow of information and, for the first time, putting local exhibition makers and institutions in contact with an international art public unmediated by the univocal perspective perpetuated by the few leading art journals.

"The Best Surprise Is No Surprise" covers a 7-year period beginning in 1999, and chronicles communiqués for exhibitions, publications, events and symposia chosen from the archive of electronic announcements originally distributed by e-flux, and selected both by the e-flux readers and by some of the most active international curators, artists, critics, and art historians of our time, including Zdenka Badovinac, Binna Choi, Elena Filipovic, Jörg Heiser, Sam Keller, Jessica Morgan, Molly Nesbit, Nancy Spector, Tirdad Zolghadr, and many more.

The book also contains an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist