Why Your Shelf Looks Like a Gallery

Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve certainly seen Ramon Casas’s “After the Ball” on the cover of a novel. The painting renders a disheveled woman in a black dress slumped on a green couch, a book she’s too exhausted to read in her hand. (Same.) It’s one of the more recognizable examples from the painted book cover trend, which has slowly overtaken lit-fic shelves in the last decade.

Tara Anne Dalbow spoke with editors, cover designers, and publishing executives to tease out a few patterns from newer releases with figurative portraits on their jackets, and the commercial and artistic appeal of such imagery.

More in this edition, including a book on a notorious art trafficker who plundered Khmer temples to fill Western museums, reviewed by Emiline Smith, repatriation scholar extraordinaire. Critic and textile artist Julie Schneider also reads a new biography of Anni Albers, who spent decades chipping away at the false dichotomy between craft and art.

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Art-Science Undisciplined: A Playbook for Transformative Collaboration

Artist Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell reimagine collaboration through a values-based and joyfully undisciplined practice.

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