This year’s show is an imaginative and openly political space that flies in the face of the commercial book sphere.
Books
Snapshots of Everyday Palestinian Life Before the Nakba
Archival photography in Against Erasure ranges from uprisings to olive tree cultivation and an open-air cinema.
How Big Cats Once Symbolized France’s Colonialist Ambitions
Myth and Menagerie urges us to view lions as sentient beings and not as timeless, passive objects of representation for 19th-century French artists.
The Scholar Who Rewrote Black Brazilian History
Beatriz Nascimento’s groundbreaking research defied dominant White Brazilian academic narratives, instead emphasizing Black political agency.
Objects That Tell the History of LGBTQ+ Resistance
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects serves less as a catalog and more as a continuation of a years-long effort to tell a millennia-long history.
The Contrived Rivalry Between Two Pioneering French Women Artists
Whenever French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is mentioned, it’s almost always as a counterpoint to her better-known “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
A Palestinian Poet’s Fragmented Grief
In Border Wisdom, Ahmad Almallah embraces the fissures that language cannot mend.
John Berger Lost His Eyesight to Cataracts and Learned to See
After being afflicted with cataracts, the late critic and novelist reflected on the mechanics of sight.
12 Graphic Novels to Read This Spring
Get your comic fix with moving, witty, poignant books by Ai Weiwei, Tessa Hulls, Julia Wertz, Mattie Lubchansky, and more.
Why We Still Need the Godzilla Network
If there’s a lesson from the Godzilla anthology, it’s that Asian-American art is deeply complex, much like the many manifestations of Godzilla the monster.
The Tragic, Poetic, and Ironic Ways in Which Artists Die
A new book by former Met Museum archivist Jim Moske assembles a haunting and hilarious revue of artist obituaries from 1906 to 1929.
Decolonizing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Nikesha Breeze’s A Mutiny of Morning reclaims African voices from the controversial novel.