‘to light, and then return—: Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann’ at Gagosian, September 14–October 28, 2023
© Sally Mann. Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian. In a storied career spanning nearly fifty years, the photographer Sally Mann has known no shortage of either acclaim or controversy. Her latest exhibit at Gagosian, to light, and then return—, shows work as new, serious, and beautiful as anything she ever has made, but it seems […]
‘Art Monsters’ By Lauren Elkin & ‘Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery’ at David Zwirner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2023, 354 pp. To make art in a monstrous world, must we embrace the monstrous? Lauren Elkin’s newest book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, is a meditation on this question. Elkin takes her title from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which the narrator, a character […]
‘You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other than Love’ By Marcia A. Zug & ‘Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story’ By Leslie Jamison
Steerforth, January 2024, 336 pp. Along with enticing images of gowns, news about celebrity weddings, and tips for choosing rings, a recent issue of Brides magazine offered “65 Happy Marriage Quotes that Will Inspire Every Couple.” The quotations, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Justin Timberlake, George Clooney and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, among scores of others, […]
‘Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop’ By Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan
Bloomsbury, February 2024, 320 pp. Like all first signs, it was easy to dismiss. Even more so since it came from an English teenage model. I was hanging out with her godmother during Paris fashion week about five years ago. As we left an event and passed a scrum on the streets, the girl stopped […]
‘How to Say Goodbye’ by Wendy MacNaughton
Bloomsbury Publishing, 128 pp Oakland-based artist Wendy MacNaughton spent 2017 at the Zen Project Hospice in San Francisco, sitting with residents, listening to them reflect on death. She wrote down what she heard and drew what she saw. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look […]
‘We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel’ By Catherine Newman
Harper, November 2022, 224 pp. We All Want Impossible Things, the first novel for adults by Catherine Newman, traces two best friends—Ash and Edi—in their last few weeks together as Edi dies of ovarian cancer. We open on Edi, Ash, and Edi’s husband learning that there is nothing more the doctors can do and that […]
‘Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words’ By Jenni Nuttall
Viking, August 2023, 304 pp. Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words reminds us that patriarchy is not only terrifyingly huge but nightmarishly granular. This spirited, scholarly book marshals a languageful of evidence to prove that our external bodies, actions, and rights are not all that have been colonized by men—so have our words. […]
‘Ordinary Notes’ By Christina Sharpe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2023, 392 pp. In July 2016, I knelt on the floor amid piles of dirty laundry in my apartment in Brooklyn, sorting clothes by what goes in the dryer and what doesn’t. Nobody was around me and no one needed me, so I could feel what I felt and think […]
‘Free Them All: A Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System’ By Gwenola Ricordeau
VERSO, AUGUST 2023 192 PP Harsh prison sentences are often depicted as feminist triumphs. Harvey Weinstein’s sentencing was covered as a vindication of the survivors of his crimes, some of whom advocated the “maximum sentence” in interviews; an attorney statement celebrated Weinstein’s having to “live out the remainder of his miserable life behind bars.” After […]
‘The Vaster Wilds’ By Lauren Groff
Riverhead, September 2023, 272 pp. Lauren Groff’s new novel, The Vaster Wilds, is a survival story: in the early seventeenth century, a girl flees the starving, disease-ridden settlement at Jamestown, Virginia and makes her way alone through the wilderness. The novel is also a revision of the settlement narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, […]