Books
What Are Exhibition Catalogues for?
No exhibition of any pretension is complete without lasting proof of its existence, preferably in print on coated paper.
Books
Books
An Ebay Purchase That Revealed the Everyday Lives of French Surrealists
Reading between the lines of contact information for friends, graphologists, psychoanalysts, and plumbers, Brigitte Benkemoun’s Finding Dora Maar reveals a map of a bygone France.
Books
Olivia Laing’s Essays Make a Case for Why Art Matters in Turbulent Times
As exterior life shuts temporarily down, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is a useful reminder that connection can be intellectual as well as physical.
Books
Susan Howe's Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
Books
Questioning the Very Form of the Book
Madeline Gins uses the form to dislodge our notion of individual subjectivity, the narrator commonly known as “I.”
Books
The Media’s Brave New World
Two new books focusing on journalism and news, and on how they are delivered, offer expansive visions of what “the media” have become.
Books
Lifestyle Over Life: Stephen Wright’s Vision of America
Wright’s darkly comic novel burrows into our hollow cravings, and finds more hollowness.
Books
The Central, Yet Invisible, Labor of Motherhood in Art
Curators, scholars, artists, and designers reflect on the labor and experience of motherhood in the new essay collection Inappropriate Bodies.
Books
Ruth Asawa’s Life and Legacy, in Both Art and Education
Marilyn Chase’s new biography sheds light on Asawa’s contributions to San Francisco’s public schools and its artistic community at large.
Books
The Writer as Citizen of the World
Charles North is one of the rare citizens of the world in that he remains open to it.
Books
How Women Helped Revolutionize the Art of Printmaking
A new book examines the collective Atelier 17, whose members redefined beliefs about gender identity and artistic achievement in the 1940s and ’50s.
Books
In Carmen Maria Machado's Experimental Memoir, a House Is More Nightmare Than Dream
Focusing on relationships between women, Machado also considers how heterosexual relationships shape and limit our understanding of what constitutes partner abuse.