Layli Long Soldier’s Quilted Poetry
The Lakota poet reflects on the visual art in her new book, 10 art titles we’re reading this month, and a biography of Beverly Buchanan sets the record straight.
The days have been cut short here in North America, swiftly and cruelly. But if there’s anything a brutal 4:50pm sunset can teach us, maybe it’s that turning to a good art book can be just as nourishing as a trip down Museum Mile. For our last monthly list of the year, our editors and critics recommend new art books that make the season bright: a glimpse into Rosa Luxemburg’s secret herbarium, Salman Toor’s latest catalog, essays by Celia Paul, who Natalie Weis says “writes much like she paints.”
Layli Long Soldier is another figure who blurs the boundaries between text and art, uniting them in her new poetry collection We. Artist Dyani White Hawk, her longtime friend and colleague, interviewed her about the shape of her poems, her monumental quilts, and how Lakota philosophy guides her work. Among many insights about art and grief that stopped me in my tracks, a favorite is: “I think creating is equivalent to love. It can be received or it can be dismissed, but we give it because we must.”
More below, including a biography of polymath Beverly Buchanan and artist Martha Wilson on living through the Culture Wars at the center of Isaac Butler’s new book.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
Layli Long Soldier’s Poetic Lifeblood
Reading Layli Long Soldier’s newest publication, We (Graywolf Press, 2026), is a visual experience. She leads us across the page through poetry and storytelling, but her work is far more than ideas, statements, and wordplay. Even when just text on the page, it is both literature and visual art. Through this bridge, it creates deep connections to our innermost experiences — at times validating our own humanity, or providing a window into another’s. Fittingly, the title has two meanings: the English “we” and the Lakota “wé,” meaning “blood,” a shared lineage and life source. | Dyani White Hawk
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New Art Books from the Quarto Group
From art history to instruction, Quarto publishes visually-rich books for artists of all mediums and skill levels.
Guide
10 Art Books to Curl Up With This November
The publishing industry is already preparing for spring, but we’re still stuck on all the delights and challenges of this fall’s slate of art books. Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara recommends an exploration of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s secret garden of pressed plants, an art form in its own right; critic Natalie Weis sinks into painter Celia Paul’s kinetic prose. Catalogs on Salman Toor, Roy Lichtenstein, and more to discover below. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
Read MoreFrom Our Critics
Beverly Buchanan at the Raw Edge of Art
Instead of leaving the South behind, the polymath artist carried it into her writings, zines, paintings, and “shack sculptures” that echo the architecture of her childhood. | Maria Owen
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The War on Art Is Repeating Itself
As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. | Martha Wilson
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Bold New Books in Art and Visual Culture from the MIT Press
From activist art and trans aesthetics to lowriders, global skateboarding culture, and Vilém Flusser’s prescient vision of the screen age.
In the News
- Every gallerist and curator in the US should read Let’s Make Latin American Art Exotic Again. Full of absurdist declarations like “Latin American Art Gallery Opens New Exhibition And The Art Doesn’t Seem So Latin American” that could be Onion headlines, the bilingual book joins a long tradition of wielding satire against the Western art world’s attitude toward artists from, well, literally everywhere else. Venezuelan artist Ricardo Báez told me over email that he approached the political implications of this dynamic “not as a theorist, but rather like a comedian.”
“I prefer to laugh and poke fun at it rather than frame it as a conflict, because the conflict is already there,” Báez explained. “I know there are artists who have produced work ironizing the mechanics of art and Latin American art — Pablo Helguera, for instance — and I’ve always admired that approach through humor.” One phrase he riffs on throughout is “Latin American Art Is” — fill in the blank. “Latin American art often reflects what Latin America is not, and how the region is presumed it should look,” he continued. “When faced with that, all that's left is to laugh.” - Pulitzer Prize-winning author, data journalist, and artist Mona Chalabi, who also happens to be an absolute delight, is going on tour for the release of her first book, Ten Lives.
- Crossword author and writer Natan Last’s Across the Universe is coming out this month in paperback.
Required Reading
- Véronique Hyland’s feature on the quagmire of “reading monoculture” is an illuminating snapshot of how we got here, but it’s not the anti-BookTok screed you’ve seen a million times. She instead focuses on the declining fields of book criticism and journalism, the unsung backbone of literary culture that is slowly disintegrating. [Elle]
- Comic artist Art Spiegelman reflected on 9/11 and the rerelease of his 2004 book In the Shadow of No Towers during an event at the Brooklyn Public Library. [Publishers Weekly]
- Literary scams are spreading like wildfire, and they’re particularly harmful for vulnerable authors seeking recognition from an indifferent industry; this gives us a glimpse into their mechanics. [Dial]
What We're Reading
Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
I'm halfway through Jennifer Kabat's excellent memoir The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion (2024), in which she expertly weaves her personal and family story into the history of the 19th-century tenant revolt in the New York Catskills known as the "Anti-Rent War." Kabat's punk spirit comes through her writing, and her depictions of art and what it does to the human soul are particularly satisfying.
Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
Valeria Luiselli makes storytelling feel fresh again, so I turned to her to pull me out of my reading slump. I’ve read three of her other books but am just now getting to the one I probably should’ve started with: The Lost Children Archive (2019).
ICYMI
Turning Turner’s Legacy
“Turner and the Slave Trade” recasts Romanticism’s relationship to nature and landscape painting as a vehicle for colonial propaganda. | Tao Leigh Goffe
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