Does Surrealism still matter? Has it ever mattered? The question is hardly new, and has been debated practically since the movement was launched. Already in 1930, a mere six years after its brash inauguration, the twenty-something poet René Daumal was cautioning André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, primary theorist, and author of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), against the threat of irrelevance through popular acceptance: “Beware, André Breton, of one day figuring in study guides to literary history; whereas if we aspire to an honor, it is to be inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms.” (An apt warning, as Breton and many other Surrealists have since figured in quite a few study guides.)

A dozen years later, Breton himself, in exile in the United States during World War II, fulminated to students at Yale University against the “impatient gravediggers” who declared Surrealism over and done. Given that many of the young men in the audience were thinking about their looming draft notices, we can imagine that they, too, were wondering how relevant Surrealism was to their lives at that moment. And today, as Surrealism marks its centennial, and as its fortunes over the past fifty years have risen, fallen, and risen again, it’s a question worth pondering once more.

Indeed, much like the students at Yale, young people of the twenty-first century could hardly be faulted for wondering what a bunch of eccentric writers and artists showing off their dream states could have to do with such pressing concerns as social and racial injustice, a faltering job market, gross economic inequities, the decimation of our civil liberties, questions of gender identity and equality, environmental devastation, education reform, or, once again as I write this, the specter of world war. All the more so in that the word “surreal” has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for a vague cluster of things, a catchall term that runs the gamut from the unnerving to the merely kooky.

The answer is that Surrealism engaged with all of these crises. To cite several examples: The Surrealists’ outspoken critiques of French colonialism and racism share many points in common with current debates about racial equality and social justice. Their opposition to war and the military, dating as far back as World War I, was echoed in protests against France’s involvement in Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam, among others. The frankness with which they addressed sexuality, though this does not airbrush the more than equivocal position of women in the movement, was audacious for its time, and has had lasting echoes in contemporary attitudes. Their skepticism about work is almost a direct pre-echo of today’s Great Resignation.

In addition, their unflagging resistance to the constraints preached by the double act of Catholicism and bourgeois morals helped pave the way for our more secular, comparatively less regulated, times. And their challenge to the rigid, rote-based educational system used in France for much of the twentieth century predates the pedagogical reforms of Piaget and Montessori. Little wonder that the Surrealist declarations spray-painted on the walls of Paris during the May 1968 student protests, though they had been coined more than forty years earlier, sounded as if freshly minted.

Even those unaware of Surrealism’s influence on aspects of our social and political existence acknowledge the movement’s impact on everything from fine art and literature to advertising, design, and popular culture. Without the Surrealist concept of “black humor,” for instance, it’s difficult to imagine the Theatre of the Absurd, Monty Python, the cinema of David Lynch, or any number of recent and current film and TV offerings.

The group’s practice of automatic writing feeds directly into the work of Bob Dylan, the Beats (especially William Burroughs’s cut-ups), the New York School poets, and many others in their wake. Their art exhibits and demonstrations forecast the later emergence of performance art, installation art, and multimedia constructions. And Surrealist-inflected imagery has gotten so prevalent that it doesn’t so much fade into the landscape as become the landscape.

Still, merely being a precursor is not enough. To my mind, Surrealism’s true legacy is less as a forerunner than as a disruptor, something that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity. Or again, as a code-mixer, which takes in elements of its past, present, and projected future and recombines them, reworks them, reimagines them into something new, and then something newer.

While some members’ actions and attitudes might seem less than satisfactory, especially by current standards (which themselves will be reevaluated by future generations), I believe that their involvement with the issues listed above has much to say to the present moment, in what they got wrong as much as in what they got right.

One of Surrealism’s main drivers was a refusal of the values that European society tried to force on them. As political beings, they abhorred the bellicose jingoism that came screeching to the forefront during the War of 1914-18, and they felt revulsion not only toward the war itself but also toward the societal status quo that had fostered it, as well as the economic disparities, blatant racism, and intellectual blandness that went with it.

As writers and artists, they repudiated—at least in theory—the careerism and complacency that underscored so much literature and art, and that led to creative stagnation, not to say to a tacit or overt endorsement of the crumbling social contract. By nature, Surrealist works are animated by an emphatic dissociation from the reigning orthodoxy, whether political, societal, or aesthetic.

The means by which the Surrealists sought both to reject the Western world’s menu of choices (its murderous oppression as well as its brain-deadening banality) and to infuse human life with a higher and more consequential meaning followed several main avenues: the search for marvels, whether through automatism, unconscious states, or the exploration of chance and coincidence; the emphasis on humor and play; the elevation of desire and sexuality into a revolutionary force; the constant search for new expressive forms, along with the transmutation of ordinary objects into objects of desire; and the reimagining of political activism not as a basic wage-and-labor program but as a much more wide-ranging liberation of the human mind.

Of these, the aspect of Surrealism that to me epitomizes why it continues to resonate through changing trends and urgencies is its unwavering belief that the marvels it sought were a force for universal emancipation, within everyone’s reach. The aim was to tap into previously unsuspected resources and unleash the potential we all possess for wonder, invention, and salutary rage.

Otherwise put, Surrealism’s importance lies not so much in the works it produced as in the attitudes underlying them. Those who equate the movement with names such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos might find this surprising. But though Surrealism is now generally considered a movement in literature and the arts, and while its principal members indeed used artistic means, their initial impulses were mainly philosophical, political, and experimental.

Breton, a former medical student who had studied neurology and psychiatry, defined it with scientific tonalities as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express… the actual functioning of thought.” Surrealism in its essence tends not toward aesthetics but toward a radical new means of seeing the world, even a set of ethical guideposts.

To take this one step further, it has often been charged that, when compared with such currents as Impressionism, Cubism, or Expressionism, Surrealism yielded relatively few iconic artworks—a view most notably posited eighty years ago by Alfred Barr, Jr. in the catalogue to his 1936 “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” show at the Museum of Modern Art: when Surrealism stops being “a cockpit of controversy,” writes Barr, “it will doubtless be seen as having produced a mass of mediocre pictures… a fair number of excellent and enduring works of art, and even a few masterpieces.”

It’s true that for every melted watch and fur-covered teacup, for every Nadja and Paris Peasant and Chien andalou, there are hundreds of books and visual works that seem at best derivative, at worst frankly pedestrian, the stuff of which parodies are made. But is that the point? Without these so-called lesser works (and who’s to judge?), we’d have a much poorer illustration of what Surrealism engendered, what it inspired, and what it made possible.

One of Breton’s many attempts to encapsulate the movement’s wide-ranging goals was: “Transform the world, change life, refashion human understanding from top to bottom.” This is admittedly a tall order, but one that arguably has kept Surrealism from ossifying into an artifact, to be dusted off every few years, set on an exhibition shelf, then shoved back in the drawer.

As it happens, that last assertion has been given a regrettable and unexpected opportunity to be tested: Conceived shortly before Covid-19 upended the world and composed in the years that followed, this book was written against a backdrop of upheavals that included a global pandemic and its resultant social disruptions; the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many others; an ongoing reckoning (or lack thereof) with legacies of racial injustice and gross economic disparities; stark political polarization in country after country, with the attendant specter of increasingly autocratic regimes; and, as I write, the catastrophe of war in Ukraine.

Surrealism emerged under disturbingly similar circumstances, spurred by the carnage of World War I, fueled by the political and social unrest that followed throughout Europe, and haunted by the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918–20. Its legitimacy and relevance were called into question many times over the following decades, and it was all but eclipsed by the advent of the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, and by the threat of nuclear annihilation that we have in no way eliminated, merely incorporated into our daily existence. Is it coincidence that the movement is now experiencing a resurgence of interest, as evidenced by the stream of recent publications and exhibitions highlighting it as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon?

When René Daumal laid the accent on the “cataclysmic” aspect of Surrealism, rather than on the writings, paintings, films, and other artifacts it was busily producing, he foresaw a crucial but, at the time, little-recognized truth: that the permanent newness and effectiveness of the Surrealist message will depend on its continued capacity to respond to the upheavals forced upon it and incite its own upheavals in return, rather than its ability to fabricate art or literary objects.

More than any other intellectual current of modern times, Surrealism posited a world that could embrace, equally and indivisibly, the violence of rebellion and the passion of creation. This book aims to parse out what is living and what is dead in Surrealist ideas, what is vibrant and what stale; to evaluate why, and whether, the revolution that Surrealism sought to foment can still claim the qualifier, as one of its tracts put it nearly a century ago, of “first and always.”

__________________________________

From Why Surrealism Matters by Mark Polizzotti. Published by Yale University Press in January 2024. Reproduced by permission.

In 1990, I had a retrospective exhibition in a Chicago gallery—ten years of my artwork collected from museums and private collectors, along with my six newest paintings. An honor, though I did not want the show. I felt too young for a mid-career survey, put it off twice, but  finally gave in.

On opening night there was a major snowstorm and few people showed up, a handful of brave Chicago friends, the art dealer and his wife. Not much of a party, though we drank a lot of wine. The next day flights were delayed, and it was not until evening, slightly hungover, that I finally boarded a plane.

I know the exact time I arrived home because when I turned the television on, the eleven-o’clock news had just begun. I was unpacking, only half listening to reports of a fire raging out of control on Chicago’s waterfront, when the phone in my studio started to ring. I had a bad feeling even before I picked up the phone and heard my gallery dealer’s choked sobs along with stereo sirens—through the phone and on my television—and knew it before he said, “The gallery is on fire.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but I watched the building burn down on television, ten years of my art up in smoke.

The next day I was awakened by another call, this one from a Chicago reporter asking how it felt to lose my artwork in a fire. I said, “I wanted to be hot in Chicago but not the toast of the town.” How I managed to be such a smart-ass I will never know, though in times of anxiety, even tragedy, I tend to fall back on comedy. My statement became a banner in the Chicago Tribune.

In general, people were kind. Many friends, even curators and art dealers I didn’t know, sent me condolences. My art life had changed overnight though I didn’t yet know it yet. I struggled to paint, even tried replicating a few of the lost paintings (a terrible idea) and questioned why I had become an artist in the first place (something I had never questioned before).

Later that year, when I was invited to the American Academy in Rome, it was a chance to escape. I always say Rome was a great place to be depressed. I could not paint in my airy Academy studio with its spectacular views over the city. Instead, I went to museums and churches and made drawings, copies of great Italian art, something I had never done in art school. It was the beginning of another career (one I could not have anticipated) as a legal art forger.

But there was something else I did in Rome: I started a novel. It was about an artist who had lost all of his work in a fire. When I got home, nearly a year later, I reread it and couldn’t bear the protagonist, a whiney entitled mid-career artist. And so, I killed him. On the page. It was a great exercise and it led me to rewrite the book as a thriller, which became my first novel.

The Death Artist was an unexpected success, and I got a contract for two more books. I had not only survived the fire but had gotten a second career.

*

Writing and painting are very different. When you make a painting, you see it, as opposed to a novel that lives mostly in your head. But the two have similarities, both creative acts about trial and error, painting and repainting or writing and rewriting, both about trying to say something—one in words, one in images.

I did not give up painting, though trying to balance two careers became increasingly difficult. Eventually, I opted out of my serious art career in favor of writing though I continue to draw every day.

And there is that ironic side gig I hinted at earlier: making copies of well-known artworks for collectors, something I never imagined I would do but enjoy, inhabiting the mind and hand of another artist, which came in handy when I started writing about art theft and forgery. I knew what it felt like to copy a great painting when I wrote the character of an art forger in The Last Mona Lisa, and I understood the man too, a remarkably gifted imitator who yearns to be a great painter.

Being an artist has undoubtedly informed my writing, not only the subject matter, but the way I see the world. When I go anywhere to research a book, I draw the sights and the people. It’s my way of understanding a place, of really seeing it. I hope it makes my writing visual, and more vivid.

There is also my training as an artist. Other than people who’ve gone to art school, few understand how rigorous it is, all-day drawing and painting workshops, up half the night doing exercises in color and design. That discipline has helped me in my writing life. Hours of drawing, painting, and repainting, have translated into hours of writing and rewriting. In both acts you are constantly making decisions about what goes where, what feels right, trusting your acquired intuition, and the joy (sometimes difficulty) of working alone.

I can’t say I’d recommend a fire, but it changed my life in an unexpected way. It threw me off course, out of my chosen career path and into another. I was knocked down for a while, but then I got up, and without consciously thinking about it, I took stock of what I had and used it as I moved forward into something new, and for that I am grateful.

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Jonathan Santlofer’s The Last Van Gogh is available now from Sourcebooks.

Featured Image: Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, by William Blake

Much like the present moment, the nineteenth century was a time of rapid social and technological change and political turmoil. In England, the first railroads began crossing the country in 1830, which opened the floodgates to individual mobility and mass industrialization. The revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe challenged absolute monarchies and capitalism; protesters demanded everything from freedom of the press to women’s suffrage, workers’ rights and political reform.

In 1859, the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species questioned long-held beliefs in divine creation; the discovery of electromagnetic waves in 1886, the invention of the X-ray in 1895—what was invisible could now be seen—and radioactivity in 1896 proved that the physical world was as mutable as alchemists had always believed. A flurry of artistic movements came into being, testing the limits of art’s perceptual relationship to the spiritual and physical realms.

Romanticism—full of moody lakes and brooding mountains, with men gazing into infinity and women embodying everything from virtue to sin—valorized subjectivity over eighteenth-century rationalism and paved the way for Surrealism, with its embracing of unreason and journeys into the recesses of the mind.

In Paris’s belle époque, Symbolism offered an escape from the hardships of everyday life via waking dreams and mysticism. Inspired by movements such as Rosicrucianism—the seventeenth-century Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross—a dizzying amount of Spiritualist groups gained a foothold in the imaginations of artists and writers.

Two of them in particular were to have an impact on modern art: Theosophy, and London’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late nineteenth-century secret, ceremonial magic order devoted to the study of the occult, metaphysics and the paranormal.

In the mid-1990s, I was granted a fellowship from my art school in Melbourne to travel to London to paint. A few months after I arrived, I visited the Royal Academy to see an exhibition of work by the so-called Young British Artists—Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and others. I was in a conundrum: I felt I had to return to Australia, but I wanted to stay in London. I was looking for something but what it was, I couldn’t say.

I knew it wasn’t the work of the Young British Artists; much of it sizzled with life but was too big and brash for my state of mind; it was like being shouted at in a pub. (It reminded me of the Melbourne art movement in the 1980s, which was called “Roar.” My friend David and I decided to start a counter-movement called “Whimper.”) I was worrying about the pictures I was making; the money was running out and I had just begun waitressing in a Soho café called Aurora. (The irony of its celestial name in a city where light pollution had made all but the brightest stars disappear didn’t escape me.) Feeling rather dejected, on my way out of the Royal Academy my attention was caught by a sign advertising a side exhibition of Victorian fairy painting.

I entered and felt an immediate kinship: sixty-six hallucinatory paintings and drawings from the golden age of fairy painting, which took place between about 1840 and 1870—something I knew absolutely nothing about. I was entranced by the near-supernatural powers of observation of Richard Dadd, the wild fancies, translucent beings and benign animals who populated John Anster “Fairy” Fitzgerald’s canvases and the thinly veiled orgies—which masqueraded as meetings of fairy courts—of Noel Paton and Robert Huskisson.

Out of the thirty-five artists included in the show, only two were women: the pre-Raphaelite painter, illustrator and women’s rights campaigner Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, and the Italian-British artist, writer, illustrator and folklorist Estella Canziani. The strange worlds these artists evoked, so teeming with life, chimed with my sense of dislocation. In one fell swoop my inarticulate longing for something that might elevate a waitress’s daily grind was assuaged.

Whereas the words “fairy painting” now imply something saccharine, in the nineteenth century it was a serious business—a convenient loophole in the skewed logic of Victorian censoriousness. Unlike contemporary fairies, who have been relegated to the nursery, their Victorian audience was an adult one and painters competed to come up with visions that were ever more extreme.

If a painter put wings on an image of a naked girl, then she was no longer human, and so exempt from the rules of propriety that governed representations of the so-called real world—she could fly half-naked, if the painter so desired. Yet despite the wild scenarios, these artists weren’t plucking their visions from the air. The many motivations for wanting to believe in other realms have, over the centuries, been manifold. British culture, like all cultures, is rich with occult references.

Many of the esoteric beliefs that were to become so popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries grew from myths, which, as the embodiment of the cumulative experience of generations of country-dwellers, changed with each telling. Shakespeare, in particular, made use of folklore, especially in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, plays which understood that life is fleeting, dreams can guide us and the physical realm is often illusory. Fairies were slippery signifiers: stars of the stage, symbolic remnants of a displaced people, fallen angels, heathen dead, the embodiment of a pure soul or the unconscious made flesh.

Shakespeare was just one of the many sources of inspiration for Victorian painters: the fourteenth-century poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer, whose “elf-queene” features in The Canterbury Tales, and William Blake, along with Celtic myths and folk tales, were often referenced. Charles Dickens argued with George Cruickshank—who, in 1823, was the first British illustrator of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm—about the latter’s tendency to use fairy tales as a way of lecturing on the evils of drink.

Dickens believed that fairy tales instilled in children “forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force,” and that “in a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected … A nation without fancy, without some great romance, never did, never can, never will hold a place under the sun.”

Two decades later, Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales arrived in England and became a bestseller, translated from the Danish by the poet and activist Mary Howitt, whose husband, the writer William, and daughter, the author and artist Anna Mary (more on her later), were Spiritualists (Mary later converted to Catholicism); the first séance they attended was at the home of the logician and mathematician Augustus de Morgan.

In 1862, “Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti’s best-known poem—a sinister story of two young sisters lured by goblins into eating forbidden fruit and so losing their innocence—was published, and in 1863, Charles Kingsley’s book The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby—a tale of a chimney sweep escaping his grim life via drowning and becoming a “water-baby” in a fairy realm—was a hit. In 1865, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland—which he originally titled Alice in Elfland—imagining a dreamworld more vivid than reality.

This constant shift—from oral folk tales to literary fairy tales to poems and pictures, from culture to culture, language to language—was symptomatic of a wider restlessness, or perhaps unease, at the speed of cultural change. As the country became industrialized, the old ways were deemed increasingly anachronistic. But still, the fairies persisted. They were, it would seem, adaptable.

That so many Victorian fairy paintings verge on the hallucinogenic wasn’t simply a response to folklore, urban malaise or swift social change; many artists were imbibing vast amounts of laudanum, the opiate derivative used by painters (and Queen Victoria, who was believed to have attended a séance at her home on the Isle of Wight), to stimulate their imaginations to even higher levels of invention.

I read somewhere that fairy painters guarded their visions so closely that they would cross the road if they saw another painter coming. That said, some artists, such as Richard Dadd, had no need of drugs to induce their revelations: in 1842, on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East, he became a devotee of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead and the afterlife. When he returned to England the following year, Dadd murdered his father at the deity’s behest and spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of the creatures who populated his dreams.

I became so obsessed with his pictures—their robust delicacy and wild, imaginative flights, their microscopic flourishes—that I decided to stop painting for a while and write a novel about the year in Richard Dadd’s life when everything went so tragically wrong.

____________________________

Excerpted from The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie. Copyright © 2024. Published by Pegasus Books.

I’m not sure when the blind pencil vendor entered my consciousness as a stock character in the urban landscape. All I know is that he (he seems always to be a he) has been jabbing my blind sensibilities for a long time. I do, however, remember exactly when I first encountered a blind writer identifying with him. That was in the 1999 memoir, Slackjaw, by Jim Knipfel—who is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, and who I and other like-minded “blindos” (blind plus weirdo) consider the patron saint of blind punks.

On the eve of Knipfel’s blind-man training, someone at work asked him “what my trainers would do to me.”

Knipfel’s answer was: “First thing, I imagine… is they’re going to give me a tin cup full of pencils and station me on the corner of Forty-seventh and Fifth, just to see how much money I can make.”

Another friend pushed the idea further. “You know what you do? You take one of those pencils, see, and jab it into people’s eyes when they stop, and say, ‘Ha! Now you can go sell pencils, too!'”

This passage made me giggle when I read it years ago, and it made me giggle again when I reread it a few weeks ago. It was the first thing I thought of when I discovered a black and white photo of a blind pencil vendor in the New York Public Library.

As a blind person who wrote a book mobilized against ocularcentrism, I was as shocked as anyone to suddenly find one day that I had become obsessed with photography—or, rather, the obsession sighted photographers have with blind subjects. And so it was that I found myself researching the many anonymous blind faces in the vast photography collection of NYPL’s Wallach Division. This is how I discovered Walter Silver’s black and white photograph of a blind pencil vendor taken in the 1950s in New York City.

Silver’s blind pencil vendor features a man in a heavy coat sitting on the ledge of what appears to be a department store window. The man holds pencils in one hand and a sign written on the lid of the box that he’s holding on his lap with the words: “Blind” in big letters, and in smaller print: “Please buy a pencil. Thank you.”

After having both sighted humans and AI describe this photo to me, I decided to learn what some blind writer friends thought—I’m lucky enough to have a few very good ones! Of course, I started with Knipfel. I emailed him a description of Silver’s photo, and asked him a bunch of questions that basically boiled down to: why does the blind pencil vendor continue to resonate? Is it, like, related to low expectations? Both the low expectations most sighted people have for blind people and, more vexing still, the low expectations we newly blinded people have for ourselves?

Photo by Walter Silver, from the NYPL Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

“Yes, there’s certainly that perception that the blind are so pitiable and pathetic the only way we can make what even approaches a living is to sell pencils on street corners,” he agreed. But he noted there was something more going on. “Even though they were once a commonplace and very real phenomenon, generations after actual blind pencil salesman vanished the image remained… it became a cultural trope. The tin pencil cup was as much a signifier of blindness as a cane or dark glasses.”

One might suppose that signifier has already lost its teeth for younger generations, because, as Knipfel pointed out, “images of the blind as anything but noble and empowered are being scrubbed away.”

Yet I find the trope of the blind pencil vendor (or “BPV”) persists in depictions of blind people and in how we are treated by the sighted. The blind pencil vendor may be a thing of the past, but his presentation of blindness feels indelible. I’m nothing like him, and yet I’m mistaken for him, or, at least, something like him.

*

The blind pencil vendor was already an old story in 1890, when journalist/reformer Jacob Riis went into Lower East Side tenements with a camera and the newly discovered flash powder that allowed him to take pictures in dark places, and came out with How the Other Half Lives, a book that exposed the extreme poverty of many New Yorkers. For Riis a hundred and thirty some-odd years ago and for many of us today, the line between blind beggar and blind pencil vendor appears blurry at best.

“The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York’s streets,” wrote Riis, “because the authorities do not know what else to do with him… The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide.”

The blind pencil vendor is not really selling anything. It is a pretext for begging. A shabby disguise which fools no one. Silver’s photo clues us in to that fact: his sign announces no price; there is no sense that he will be making change for anyone. There is only the ask: “Please buy a pencil.”

I emailed Georgina Kleege, author of many books including More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, to ask her thoughts on the blind pencil vendor and why, despite (or because of?) his pitiful appearance, he feels like an easy joke.

“It must have something to do with the low value of the pencils,” she replied. “Why not sell something worth more, with more profit? Also I guess there’s the joke that he won’t know how much or how little money people are putting in his box.”

I might add: or, if people are taking money out of his box. It is not the first thing my “sighted informants” (thanks to Kleege for that term!) notice, but, there is a box to the left of the man that has a hole cut out of it. He appears to be dropping his money into that more secure place. This explains why he holds his pencils, and an empty box.

Most sighted informants find the stuff surrounding the blind pencil vendor quite eye-catching—to use a favorite sighted-people expression. To be sure, it’s a dynamic photo. On the other side of the window behind him stands a woman wearing a cloche hat, and the gathered curtains are patterned with a design that reminded one informant a little bit of Paul Klee. Most striking is the stack of newspapers bundled neatly in front of the next window over.

There’s all this interesting visible stuff surrounding the poor fellow that he doesn’t know about. It speaks to the sort of thing sighted people say to me often: It’s so sad you can’t see… the sky, this dress, how pretty you are (that was when I was younger), the spectacular fall foliage, etc.

But sighties also hit me with the opposite: it’s good you can’t see: that rat, how messy my house is, this horror or that. There seems to be an innocence attached to not-seeing that gets hung around the necks of we the blind.

The innocent ignorance of the blind is no more starkly put than in Kate Chopin’s 1897 short story “The Blind Man,” which briefly follows the ramblings of a door-to-door pencil vendor whose ignorance causes him to suffer many small discomforts but saves him from the final catastrophe. When we meet him in the heat of the day, he is walking on the sunny side of the street while everyone else is on the other side with its “trees that threw a thick and pleasant shade….But the man did not know, for he was blind, and moreover he was stupid.”

Chopin’s blind man is stupid because he does not remove his vest in the heat and trails the curb with his foot, apparently unaware that a cane (or stick) would be very useful in detecting obstacles and level changes. In other words, he is not very good at being blind.

And yet, it seems his ineptitude shields him from, first, noticing he’s almost been struck by a trolley car—which the reader/viewer is made, for an alarming moment, to believe happened. And second, continues on his way without noticing the death in his wake and the subsequent Horror “when the multitude recognized in the dead and mangled figure one of the wealthiest, most useful and most influential men of the town.”

I can’t help but notice that, in our cultural imagination, the blind pencil vendor/beggar seems always to be a man. Perhaps this is a kind of ironic inversion of the ancient blind poet/prophet (Homer/Tiresias). Perhaps too, the solo itinerant nature of the biz excludes women, who have traditionally been placed behind walls, while the blind seem always to be wandering outside them.

Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind, reminded me of Chopin’s story (I had repressed it) when I hit him with my blind pencil vendor email query. He also gave me a delightfully sharp reading of it and the handy abbreviation. “The BPV is here a ridiculous, tragic, pathetic figure,” Leland replied, “but Magoo-like, he bumbles past any real harm.”

Mister Magoo is the blind cartoon character of the mid-twentieth century who traveled the most harrowing paths, never seeing (or experiencing) any of the dangers. Leland continued: “It is as though in his forsaken state, god spares him the worst accidents. He sells no pencils, but he somehow survives, hungry and bedraggled, anyway. He has no subjectivity—too stupid for that. He is all surface, pure emblem of ignorance.”

Unlike Silver’s BPV, Chopin’s does not carry a sign. He is the sign, a metaphor, a symbol less for the blind than for the presumably sighted consumer. The Blind Man’s inconsequence is reinforced by the worthlessness of the thing he sells. Chopin underlines this worthlessness when she reveals that someone “who had finally grown tired of having him hanging around had equipped him with this box of pencils.” And, as far as we know, he never sells a single one: “the man or maid who answered the bell needed no pencil, nor could they be induced to disturb the mistress of the house about so small a thing.”

What’s most pitiful is how hard he’s working to sell something nobody wants or needs. It seems like, across the decades, “a pencil is the most trifling of goods for sale,” as Leland put it in his email.

When I mention this to one of my sighted informants, he said, “Pencils are great! I love pencils. We should go to that pencil store I told you about, get a photo of you in there!”

That particular informant is my sighted partner, Alabaster Rhumb. Pencil enthusiast. He is not alone. At Graphite Confidential, a website that chronicles “American history, one pencil at a time,” I read a brief article about how a blind organization reclaimed the BPV with images of blind children urging “mayors, socialites and everyday New Yorkers” to buy pencils stamped with “To Aid N.Y. Guild For The Jewish Blind.”

*

Stephen Kuusisto (author of Planet of the Blind and many other books of poetry and prose) finds the sign of the BPV to be a kind of stand-in for autobiography—or perhaps a barrier to it. “His appearance on the ordinary street is founded on the principle of auto-graphein,” writes Kuusisto in a lyric essay that accompanies his poem, ‘To the Pencil Seller.” “Surely he cannot write his life?” thinks the sighted passersby. “We shall buy his pencils.’

There’s something particularly degrading about the blind pencil vendor. He is selling cheap items, but more specifically, these are cheap inaccessible items. A sighted person fallen on hard times might take that hair’s-breath step up from panhandling to selling pencils, but he could—should he fail to sell them all—use one to make a note. A list perhaps of other, more lucrative, career paths. But the blind man can make no use of the pencil–except as a weapon à la Shakespeare’s archvillain in King Lear: “Out vile jelly!”

Kuusisto is provoked, ‘after long deliberation,” to write a poem in which the BPV talks back, with mystery and eloquence:

The blind man is amaranth, a man-word of sorts,
A word that will be mistaken on earth.
Still I
Saluted the closed world
Without its consent,
Cross the water of streets
And raised a sign
Unreadable as the moon.

Yes. We are human-made-word in the eyes of so many sighted. We are inscribed with meaning: blind poet/prophet, blind saint, blind beggar….And this amaranth, life-giving sacred grain, symbol of immortality. Hence death. With its red-petaled flowers that never fade. We are inscribed BPV and I, with letters we are presumably not able to read, letters that stretch from ancient times to now.

*

The endurance of the trope was made apparent to me one day on the New York City subway. I was sitting on the N Train with my guide dog, heading to NYU from Astoria. A man came up to me and was confused when he found that the lid of my Dunkin Donuts coffee was in place. Nowhere to shove his dollar. “Oh,” he said. “I thought….Here’s a dollar.”

“Um, what?” I was baffled. Then I wasn’t. All I could do to deflect the insult was laugh in his face.

In The Metanarrative of Blindness, Disability Studies professor David Bolt describes an eerily similar experience. While waiting for his friend outside of a bar, a stranger tried to hand Bolt something. Thinking it was an inaccessible flyer of some kind, he did not put his hand up to accept—his “standard little expression of protest.” The man “seemed perplexed,” and paused “before asking if I was not collecting for the blind. At that point, though not in a can or a hat, a proverbial penny dropped for us both.”

When we are mistaken for blind beggars, it’s hard not to feel like our presence in the sighted world is being “implicitly explained by a cultural construct,” concludes Bolt.

To be sure, things have changed rapidly since the BPV haunted our streets. The digital era has a lot to do with this. We have access to books and information and tools of communication previous blind generations could not have imagined.

Yet attitudes towards blindness have not changed much since the days of Riis and Chopin. The confusion many sighted people show upon learning that I use the very same iPhones and computers they do—just tricked out with text-to-speech and a Braille display—reveals, time and time again, how alien we seem to them. Many sighted people ‘assume that blind people were just dropped out of the sky without any prior knowledge of the environment,” as Kleege put it. Such people are startled to find us in their midst.

After a Brooklyn barbecue last summer, I heard from the host that when my blind friend, I, and our sighted partners left, someone who didn’t know us said with surprise, “How do you know not just one but two blind people?”

This otherwise educated and hip human still fancies us as the other half, sitting on the margins of civilization with a tin cup, a sign, and some old-school (if sometimes fetishized) and inaccessible writing implements.

Enter the stock character riddling the blind landscape. They are the ignorant sighted person who remains blissfully, stubbornly unaware of the fact that such remarks make us want to poke them in the eye. But the accessible computer is mightier than the sharpened pencil. I content myself, with this brief sketch, in the hopes that they will recognize themselves, reach deep into their pockets, and produce change.

Every few years I write a book. As penance for my past snark about aging writers using decades-old photos, I always update the author photo. For the first three books, it was fine—a lark, even!—but I was in my thirties then. I took longer to publish my fourth novel, and now, squinting into the setting sun of my forties, I’m being photographed more than ever. (I realize this makes it sound as if the paparazzi are after me, which they are not. I am being photographed by myself and by friends who would prefer to be doing something else). It’s a different experience this time around.

The central struggle of seeing your face in a photo only grows more acute with age: until confronted with endless documentation, I was free to assume the face I present to the world looks a lot like it did at 21. I suppose people who are photographed for a living must confront this chasm between belief and reality sooner than the rest of us, who bury the suspicion deep inside ourselves, where we keep the details of bombed job interviews and that time we mispronounced a common word in front of Colson Whitehead. Imagine!

Long ago, when cameras were not ubiquitous, one could go through life without ever confronting one’s wonky eye or thinning bangs. Free of constant self-documentation, people just went about their days, contentedly churning butter or fleeing dinosaurs or voting for Coolidge or however daily life looked in the distant past.

But ours is not that time. Even someone who cringes at selfies, which I do, has to get in the game for professional or social reasons. And so I have reluctantly learned a few things about being photographed—for social media, a big event, or professional headshots—particularly as a middle-aged woman with some useful delusions to maintain.

Please note that I am not telling you to commandeer the lighting at baby showers or skitter away from cameras on bad hair days. Crappy photos of wonderful moments exist, and there is no reason to day-drink over it. But if you must be immortalized, a few strategies may help avoid despair.

1. Wear more make-up than you think you should. The camera washes out a smoky eye to natural and a rosy cheek to pallid. Wear a good foundation; you’ll be glad for the even canvas. Use eyebrow pencil. Feel free to have a professional do this if it’s not your bailiwick. If you’ll be looking at these pictures for years, it’s worth it. Take a selfie or two before you leave the makeup chair and make adjustments.

2. Hair moves around a lot—mine is prone to a half-squashed donut vibe— so you have to give it a little last-minute attention. Bring a brush, give your curls a shake, but resist the urge to flip it saucily for the camera. I ask a bystander if my hair is doing something bizarre and hope for the best.

3. No one can overcome bad lighting. I once looked in the mirror in one light and felt totally fabulous. Moments later, I was photographed in a place lit like an orange morgue. Everyone looked polished and gorgeous in person and pouchy, spotted, wrinkled and grizzled in the photos. You can’t always control lighting, though, so do your best to avoid harsh overhead light and know when to destroy the evidence.

4. If you’re not a veteran of Botox or peels or facials, approach with caution. You don’t want to show up resembling Cruella DeVille with scarlet fever. Shit has to settle, is all I’ll say.

5. When positioned in the front row of a group photo, a cheerleaderish urge to crouch will steal over you. The crouch is an attempt to be gracious and not to block the faces of the people behind you, who are usually me because I elbowed aside an old woman so I could get the hell out of the front row. The problem here lies entirely with the photographer. The only humane way to photograph a multi-row group fronted by crouchers is from the waist up. To capture human beings from a perspective that includes a full-body view of several accomplished grown women crouching protectively over nothing is an act of aggression and possibly sociopathy. You know goddamn well what we’re doing when we crouch, camera-wielders. Zoom in.

6. Speaking of zooming in, when you’re enlisting someone else to take a picture, specify the frame, as in chirping merrily, “Just a head and shoulders shot!” Not long ago I had someone take a picture of me and an old friend at a reading for Instagram. It started off great, tightly framed around our smiling faces and shiny blowouts, but then the photographer took a step backward. Then several more. Our arms still slung chummily over each other’s shoulders, my friend and I emitted low simultaneous growls, like dogs sensing erratic behavior in their midst. Later, the photos displeased us.

7. Husbands are particular offenders. Just recently mine took a photo of me from an angle I would describe as “hostile,” in which my white-clad thigh resembled a grand, expansive vista, like the Badlands. Later, another male friend took a selfie of us together from an expert downward angle, and when I asked how he knew to do so, he said, “From my wife berating me.” So, they can be taught.

8. There will come a day when you are tempted to buy a peasant blouse. If you are a willowy ingenue whose sticklike limbs poke delicately out from yards of fabric, feel free to be photographed in that blouse, secure in the knowledge that all will be well. If you are a normal-sized person like me, whose very bones fail at being sticklike, do not give in to this desire. I have tried playing off a treasured flowy blouse with tight jeans, or shoving the bunched extra fabric into the back of my waistband. Both failed. I should have solved the conundrum by accepting the truth: Yes, I love to prance around in a peasant blouse like I’m beating a tambourine in a sunlit meadow, but in reality, this is not a look that makes anyone say, “She is much less delusional than I thought.”

9. Similarly: know your angles. For years I tried to rock a lifted chin and imperious downward glance, under the delusion that I was highlighting my cheekbones and jawline. But I don’t have the slanted sharp jawline and huge doe eyes that might make that angle work; I have a round face and human-sized eyes and this angle made me look supercilious and marshmallowy. After ten years, I finally retired it.

10. (Deep down, I still think: maybe someday.)

11. Maybe don’t flatten your arms against your torso. I put my hands on my hips where possible, but, failing that, I’ll just elbow out a couple inches of space, because it makes my arms look less like Dutch baby pancakes and more like my actual arms.

12. Straight-on angles are tough. I learned this from a very talented professional named Nick Wilkes, who has, perhaps unwillingly, developed a sideline as my city’s writer-photographer of choice. Put one foot forward, he’d correct me, as I lurched monstrously toward the lens with both feet cemented side by side. He’d have me turn my shoulders one way and my hips the other, and it felt psychotic but in the resulting pictures, it looked dynamic and interesting, focusing attention on my face.

That’s the goal, right? We want to look like ourselves, the best version of ourselves. There is some self-acceptance involved in realizing who that self really is. And look, I am all too aware that the bedrock here is a desire to appear youthful and thin, and that this is a problematic desire born of the toxicity of unrealistic expectations.

If I can find a way to unwire the patriarchy from my brain, I’ll write about that too. In the meantime, I’ll settle for a few photos in which I look not eerily perfect, not 22, but… myself. We all deserve a photo of ourselves on a momentous day, one we can look at and think, Yes, that was me then.

Ice, #9316 © Meghann Riepenhoff, from Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice © Radius Books.

Often described as though it was accident rather than alignment, coincidence means the coming together of two things in a more or less harmonious version of a collision, and it is in that spirit a coincidence that at a certain point in the European middle ages the mother of God became an important figure of mercy and intercession and femininity in Christian life as a new source of blue pigment arrived—pulverized lapis lazuli from far-off Afghanistan—that allowed painters to depict intense and vivid shades of blue as never before, and this blue known as ultramarine was most particularly dedicated to depicting her robes, and blue became her color, all of which I delved into after returning to view some of these paintings in which the robes pour off her like water and ripple around her feet as if in inlets and bays, paintings that make me wonder if rather than thinking of all that blue as celestial, the garb of the queen of heaven, as she was also known, it makes her aquatic, oceanic, marine, ultramarine, a living and lifegiving spring or lake, an ocean giving rise to new conditions for life as the cyanobacteria did, an entity whose liquidity is also the female condition in ways that have sometimes worried men, the porousness of those bodies that men sometimes enter and babies sometimes exit, of the flow of blood and amniotic fluid and words, of the undermining of the fantasy of solidity that is the homophobic ideal of impenetrable and autonomous manhood, when in actuality everyone and each of us is a container punctuated by openings with which to smell, to hear, to breathe, to be penetrated as a camera’s aperture is by light itself and relies constantly on inhaling and exhaling, a sort of drinking of the sky and its oxygen, on eating and excreting, the body that is also an erratic fountain of tears, urine, spit, sweat, ejaculate, the menses of fertility and the blood of injury, to say nothing of all the internal secretions of the glands, and is itself two thirds or more water, the blood an interior ocean with the salinity of an ocean moving in waves pumped along by the heart, the water of the body finding an echo in what we call a body of water, and bodies of water are themselves also not discrete, as in self-contained, but forever being added to by tributary streams and rivers and springs or being drained by distributary channels or evaporating into humidity and clouds that become storms, rain, hail, snow, sleet, returning to the solid and liquid surface of the earth: all of this to say that in one such medieval Nativity, the robe flows like water, the child who is also a god lies on a scallop of deep blue on the ground as if afloat, the god whose blood will become a symbol in a church whose rites are full of liquidities, including transubstantiation, anointment, and baptism by immersion or sprinkling with water that has been blessed, and implicit in all this is the possibility that the divine mother so often called a vessel is herself a body of water, which is a reminder of that inward sea of darkness in which each of us swam during the months before birth, and that a camera—a word that means chamber or room—is or was also a vessel of darkness into which light penetrates to impregnate the film with its image, and that the Bible is a book written by desert-dwellers in which the finding of water is often a miracle and a gift.

Ice, #6039 © Meghann Riepenhoff, from Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice © Radius Books.

*

The processes of photography were liquid for most of the medium’s history, more so and less so in various media, utterly so in Muybridge’s wet-plate era when the glass negative had to be coated with emulsion in a dark-tent on site, less so when wet plates were replaced by dry-plate film and then celluloid strip and sheet film late in the nineteenth century, but even when I learned darkroom techniques, they involved the rites of spiraling the 35mm film strips into a canister in darkness and then in the dimly lit chamber bathing the film and then the exposed photographic paper in various solutions, with the gentle sound of sloshing in cans and trays and sinks and gushing from faucets, so that the whole thing felt like alchemy and transubstantiation and mystery, and what it means to go digital, dry, and into daylight has not yet been fully explained, but it must have an impact on how artists think and see, and it all makes me think of the other liquids in visual art including clay slurry, molten metal for casting, and the squish of fresh paint carefully brushed onto the canvases of the Virgin, sloshed and poured and splashed at a certain abstract-expressionist moment that was always seen as being about the actions of the artist but was as much about the fluidity of the medium, a sea of paint hitting its canvas shores, but always left to dry so that the flow stopped and something resembling permanence or at least durability was achieved, and of course the work in this book was made by coating the paper itself in the liquid cyanide mixture in darkness and bringing it to the water’s edge to impress upon it the movement and refracting power and processes of water, liquid and frozen into crystalline formation, capturing not a split second like a snapshot but a passage of time in which the water moves or freezes into crystals, and then bringing it back for another bath, a watery process about water and in the course of so being about what water is always about when it’s liquid, namely that condition we call fluid, as in changeable, evanescent, escaping captivity, the antithesis of frozen and captured.

Ice, #6447 © Meghann Riepenhoff, from Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice © Radius Books.

*
Frozen, we say, to mean that something stopped, because ice stops things, it holds things still, holds itself still so that some of the best records of the distant past we have include ice cores from Greenland whose bubbles let scientists measure the mix of gases in the ancient atmosphere, frozen bodies of ancient men and mammoths in permafrost in Siberia or ice in the Alps, frozen viruses in graves of Spanish flu victims in Alaska, and even to say “freeze” makes me think of those children’s games where someone would call out that word as a command that we were all to suddenly hold still wherever we were no matter how comic or awkward our position, and beyond that to think of the mystery of how the pure liquidity of water becomes that solid thing ice, so that in the cold places anyone can walk on water as a god is said to have strolled on the Sea of Galilee, so that a recent pastime in cold places was recording a thrown cup of hot water freezing solid before it hits the ground, rather as the water appeared to freeze in the instantaneous Muybridge photographs, how much photography has itself been considered a project of freezing the river of time, with latitude for the artists who entertain blur or capture sequence or otherwise allow not the sharp shard of an instant but a bit of the flow of time; frozen we would say for something that stopped, and thaw for a relationship restarted or repaired after a while; there is a perspective from which to argue that the liquid is free and mobile and unrestricted and thereby better than what is stilled into ice crystals, but freezing protects things, and solidity has its charms, and really life on earth is made possible by the properties of water including the temperatures at which it is liquid and gaseous and solid, and life on earth is now troubled and menaced by the circumstances we have created in which the earth warms, the ice melts, the oceans rise, the elegant synchronicity of seasons and species are warped and shattered, and both drought and flood, along with fire, do what they have not before in this era we call interglacial because it was preceded by the ice ages that packed up so much of the earth’s water in ice that shorelines were far lower than they are now, but what comes next will not be an interglacial but a further melting of ice that will change, is changing, all the shorelines again, and everything else.

____________________________

From the essay “Seven Sentences on the Frozen and the Fluid” by Rebecca Solnit from Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice from Radius Books. Co-published with Yossi Milo. Photography by Meghann Riepenhoff. Original Text by Rebecca Solnit. Used with permission of the publisher, Radius Books. Photos copyright 2023 by Meghann Riepenhoff. Text copyright 2023 by Rebecca Solnit.

For what is now the eighth time in a row, I am pleased to present the best book covers of the year—as chosen by some of the industry’s best book cover designers.

This year, I asked 47 designers to share their favorite covers of the year, and they came back with a grand total of 139 covers (!), representing work by 85 different designers for 74 different imprints at home and abroad. The designers’ choices, and their comments, are below.

But first . . . the stats.

The stats:

The best of the best book covers:

First place (12 mentions):

Szilvia Molnar, The Nursery 
design by Linda Huang (Pantheon, March 21)

*
Second place (8 mentions):

Olga Ravn, The Employees
design by Paul Sahre (New Directions, February 7)

*
Third place (tie—6 mentions each):

Greg Jackson, The Dimensions of a Cave 
Design by Jamie Keenan (Granta Books, October 26)

Celina Baljeet Basra, Happy 
Design by Alex Merto (Astra House, November 14)

*

The presses with the most covers on the list:

First place:
FSG (19 covers)

*
Second place:
New Directions (11 covers)

*
Third place:
Pantheon (7 covers)

*

The designers with the most different covers on the list:

First place:
Na Kim (7 covers)

*
Second place:
Alex Merto (6 covers)

*
Third place (3-way tie)
Jamie Keenan, June Park, Jaya Miceli (5 covers each)

*

The best month for book covers:

First place:
August (20 covers)

*
Second place:
September (19 covers)

*
Third place:
October (18 covers)

*

The full list:

Szilvia Molnar, The Nursery (Pantheon, March 21)
Design by Linda Huang

Such wonderful simplicity, but also cleverly articulating a newborn’s not fully developed vision and the new mother’s struggle with her dissolving identity. Love the placement of ‘A Novel’.

–Holly Ovenden

Everything about this cover is so elegant and minimal. Using “a novel” as part of the illustration is such a clever way to keep from adding more elements to it.

–Vivian Lopez Rowe

–Na Kim

I gasped when I first saw this cover. Such a genius idea that speaks perfectly to the title while also avoiding cliches. The blurring is perfection.

–Jaya Nicely

Yes.

–Erik Carter

Perfectly captures the bleariness of new motherhood. Best design use of “A Novel” I’ve seen in a long time.

–Jenny Carrow

Tender, brilliant, beautiful. I almost can’t believe that Linda was able to get this approved, but I’m so glad she did.

–Alicia Tatone

Although this cover is blurred we know exactly what we’re looking at. Playful and surprising, yet elegant.

–Stephanie Ross

It’s placement of “a novel” for me. Genius!

–Cecilia Zhang

What a smart and sophisticated solution, it’s really beautiful.

–June Park

It’s perfect. The perfect choice of color, type, and image. Linda managed to find a refreshing way to evoke the tenderness, pain, and love of motherhood.

–Arsh Raziuddin

Such a bold, simple and evocative visualization of postpartum depression. Love the way “a novel” is set here and becomes part of the narrative.

–Yang Kim

Olga Ravn, The Employees (New Directions, February 7)
Design by Paul Sahre

YESSS!

–Janet Hansen

–Na Kim

No water cooler talk in this office. The dripping “s” in the title is a smart way to echo the overflow above.

–Stephen Brayda

Sinister stock image and haunted office noticeboard type, this cover looks like nothing else. Also the back cover is a work of art in itself.

–Tom Etherington

This is my favorite book cover of 2023. The image is left to sing and the simple, off-kilter type works perfectly in concert.

–Beth Steidle

This seems like a depiction of an intrusive thought a bored office worker would have while at the water cooler. The falling ’s’ adds to the overall despondent mood.

–Stephanie Ross

The cover is beautiful, but the back cover is even better.

–Arsh Raziuddin

For me, the most striking cover of the year, hands-down. The back cover is just as good, too.

–Luke Bird

Celina Baljeet Basra, Happy (Astra House, November 14)
Design by Alex Merto

Joyful, smart, eye-catching—instantly iconic.

–Holly Ovenden

–Na Kim

Amusing, witty, and incredibly clever—a funhouse distortion of the stereotypical happy face. Turning the book over is an added treat—you’re greeted with an inverted version of the cover, with that elongated smile turned wistfully upside down.

–Devin Grosz

This makes me feel happy.

–Tyler Comrie

Always a sucker for a bold smiley (and frowny!) face cover.

–Yang Kim

Just makes you smile. The use of the space is the key to this. Looks so nice on the shelf too.

–Jon Gray

Greg Jackson, The Dimensions of a Cave (Granta Books [UK], October 26)
Design by Jamie Keenan

See also: the front flap!

The back flap as front cover is a perfect backwards way to start this journey.

–Stephen Brayda

A truly weird cover, and the flaps made me laugh out loud.

–Tom Etherington

This design is so clever and trippy—tricking you into thinking you are looking at the back flap of the book. What’s really great is that the entire jacket follows through with the concept.

–Laywan Kwan

I love the back flap image on the front cover. So clever!

–Jaya Miceli

The U.S. design is excellent as well, but a particular nod of respect to the U.K. design, a mind-bender of a jacket.

–Mark Abrams

Brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. So good it’s almost unsettling.

–Luke Bird

Bronwyn Fischer, The Adult (Random House Canada, May 23)
Design by Kate Sinclair

Gorgeous execution!

–Janet Hansen

–Erik Carter

The juxtaposition of the cool, linear paint “tears” with the hyperreal portrait is enough to make ME cry. Achingly gorgeous.

–Alison Forner

Stunning interpretation of a coming-of-age novel. The super-tight crop and brush strokes work brilliantly.

–Luke Bird

I love the use of photography and paint here. Just beautiful and emotive.

–Jon Gray

Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio (Zando, March 7)
Design by Alex Merto

The liquidy script, creepy monster, and colorful geometric shapes combo create an intriguing and magical world I want to learn more about.

–Janet Hansen

The contrast between the cheery, childlike shapes and the monster lurking down on the bottom edge makes for a compelling cover.

–Stephanie Ross

The creature catches you by complete surprise in its unexpected placement beneath all the happy shapes and loopy type. The eeriness of those eyes stayed with me, even after I put the cover down. Unsettling in all the best ways.

–Cecilia Zhang

I had no idea Alex was behind this cover the whole year I’d admired it. I love everything about it; the choice of fonts, the colorful shapes, the crouching monster… everything seems to be in perfect harmony, but the tension is palpable. I want a poster!

–June Park

It’s not easy to make a cover with a red-eyed monster appealing…I guess that is unless you’re Alex Merto.

–Grace Han

Justin Torres, Blackouts (FSG, October 10)
Design by Na Kim

Hauntingly beautiful. The glossy slab in the center, the glimmer of the gold typography, the creature emerging from the inky blackness—the alchemy of these elements reflect the novel’s theme of a story blotted out and then resurrected.

–Devin Grosz

This cover is a perfect example of how to do a lot with very little. It’s an exercise in minimalism and contrast that manages to feel lush, textural, and mysterious.

–Beth Steidle

Simple but effectively executed black-on-black art. It’s smart and elegant.

–Yeon Kim

“It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me out,” said Zaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. “Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you’ve done it.” -The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

–Mark Abrams

I already thought it was perfect, and then I saw ‘a novel’. Brilliant.

–Arsh Raziuddin

Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down (FSG, February 14)
Design by Na Kim

This cover feels simultaneously bold and delicate. I can’t get over the “A Novel” disappearing into the haze. Another one that made me gasp on first sight.

–Jaya Nicely

I love how beautifully simple yet atmospheric this book cover is, It’s mesmerising, like staring into the literal sun!

–Kishan Rajani

Moody! I love looking at this.

–Anna Kochman

When it comes to effectively utilizing negative space, Na Kim dominates—and this cover is no exception. It’s like a colorful abstract painting that evokes pure emotion.

–Pete Garceau

Ada Zhang, The Sorrows of Others (Public Space Books, May 9)
Design by Janet Hansen

In a world of big shouty titles, this cover really stands out. So elegant and understated.

–Tom Etherington

Simple, quiet and beautiful. I love the gradating colors.

–Jaya Nicely

The delicately intertwined arrows work as a perfect visual metaphor for these stories—evoking the journeys undertaken by the characters across continents, generations, and deep within their own emotional landscapes. A quiet gem.

–Devin Grosz

–Allison Saltzman

Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men (New Directions, September 5)
Design by Pablo Delcan

Eye-catching perfection. I can’t stop staring at the sun. The red type on top of the green creates just the right amount of vibration.

–Sarah Schulte

–Na Kim

Simple geometric shapes, beautiful colour and Ed Ruscha type on an uncoated paper. Take my money.

–Tom Etherington

The simplicity and confidence of this cover just work!

–Cecilia Zhang

John Wray, Gone to the Wolves (FSG, May 2)
Design by Thomas Colligan

My favorite cover of the year. I’m a huge fan of the metal lettering + foil + pink endpapers.

–Stephen Brayda

–Na Kim

Exquisitely channeling the heavy-metal-death-cult vibe.

–Lauren Peters-Collaer

The type! The holographic foil! Just so much fun and visually electrifying.

–Yang Kim

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (Riverhead, October 10)
Design by Grace Han

You can hear these forks scraping! The odd colors add even more tension.

–Jenny Carrow

Bryan Washington’s covers have all been so bold and witty, and this most recent one is no exception!

–Cassie Gonzales

This color combo is so unexpected and strangely appealing. I really love when color can do a lot of the heavy lifting in creating a compelling cover. And this is a great example of color that is not in your face but still eye-catching.

–Lauren Harms

The interlocking forks! This cover feels so fresh.

–Lauren Peters-Collaer

Olga Ravn, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, My Work (New Directions, October 10)
Design by Joan Wong

I love everything Joan Wong x New Directions. Joan has a beautifully distinctive style, and she continues to do something surprising each and every time. Poster please!

–June Park

Meltingly good.

–Mark Abrams

Beautiful.

–Grace Han

Another bold interruption of a sweet image, this time with a more disturbing feel.

–Lucy Kim

Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future (FSG, October 17)
Design by Alex Merto

A thrilling mash-up of old and modern, brilliantly executed. It’s also hilarious that the lady is plummeting rather violently yet her expression remains unperturbed.

–Linda Huang

Perfect execution of an exceptional concept. Everything works in concert here to evoke both old and new.

–Alison Forner

The use of color, texture, and repetition is incredibly engaging. Every choice is so well conceived.

–Emily Mahon

It’s not just the treatment of the artwork, but the way the type echoes it that really makes me love this.

–Lucy Kim

Jamel Brinkley, Witness: Stories (FSG, August 1)
Design by Na Kim

I knew this would be one of my favorites of the year as soon as I saw it. So smart, the kind of simple that is anything but. Really elegant.

–Jamie Stafford-Hill

Even when you figure out the footprints are thumbprints, your brain still refuses to see it that way. So simple and so brilliant!

–Jamie Keenan

This is just beautiful, simple and clean. A lovely idea beautifully executed. The finished book feels nice too.

–Jon Gray

Zadie Smith, The Fraud (Penguin Press, September 5)
Design by Jon Gray

This gradient + type combo kills me. So good.

–Lauren Peters-Collaer

–Allison Saltzman

Jon Gray does it again.

–Emily Mahon

Maggie Millner, Couplets (FSG, February 7)
Design by June Park

I love how mirrored bold type treatment becomes the cover image. Pink and red!

–Jaya Miceli

What more can I say? I love clever typographic solutions. I love how the type forms a beautiful abstract shape. I love the red-pink palette. I love the display font.

–Linda Huang

So simple and so so charming.

–Anna Kochman

Mathias Énard, tr. Frank Wynne, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild (New Directions, December 5)
Design by John Gall

I need to blow this up and hang it on my wall.

–Janet Hansen

A collage with a depth and perceived dimensionality not always seen with this art creation technique.

–Nicole Caputo

The delicate type juxtaposed with the boldness of the collage, the balance of it all just works for me.

–Yang Kim

Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco, August 8)
Design by Vivian Lopez Rowe

Great use of color, love a grid design especially one with such intriguing and charming illustrations.

–Kelly Winton

This color palette is gorgeous. A lot is going on in this design and yet the whole thing is still soft and moody.

–Zoe Norvell

–Allison Saltzman

Jenn Shapland, Thin Skin (Pantheon, August 15)
Design by Tom Etherington

A truly gorgeous cover. These soft, ethereal rainbow waves elegantly wrap around to the back of the jacket, organically integrating all of the type in a sophisticated way.

–Sarah Schulte

There is a calming feel to this cover. The type is thoughtfully placed, while the undulating shapes move your eyes around the entire space.

–Kimberly Glyder

I love this by Tom Etherington, so calming and beautiful! It’s a work of art.

–Anna Morrison

Jac Jemc, Empty Theatre (MCD, February 21)
Design by June Park

A personal favorite for not only the content of the novel but the brilliant solution of how to place such a long subtitle. I love the bright colors and little stars throughout.

–Jaya Nicely

So funky and vibrant, you just want to keep looking at it and get lost in the ribbons.

–Cassie Gonzales

The spiraling type is SO FUN! The cadence of the ribbon bunching adds dimension and movement; reading the copy was a mini adventure! The sharp drop shadow is an added plus. June is an absolute pro!

–Cecilia Zhang

Jean Beagin, Big Swiss (Faber & Faber [UK], February 9)
Design by Kishan RajaniThis cover brings me pure joy. Perfection!

–Janet Hansen

This cover really packs a punch. The crop of the dog’s noses works so well—and that tongue!

–Holly Ovenden

Jen Beagin, Big Swiss (Scribner, February 7)
Design by Jaya Miceli, art by Anna Weyant

Bold image that is victorious in striking so much mystery between title and the ambiguous expression and composition…and gravity!

–Nicole Caputo

Bold, sexy—I love it.

–Yeon Kim

Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape [UK], August 31)
Design by Suzanne Dean and illustration by Anna MorrisonThis striking cover feels both vintage and contemporary. I love the subtle pink type against the orange. That gaze draws me in completely.

–Sarah Schulte

Beautiful colours and such a striking and thoughtful illustration.

–Holly Ovenden

Gabriela Wiener, Undiscovered (HarperVia, September 26)
Design by Kelly Winton

This bright, citrusy palette is so pleasing to look at. That soft green is sublime. The hole punches through the objects add a satisfying layer of mystery.

–Sarah Schulte

The shapes around the artifact remind me of rock climbing holds and I love how that implies a solitary and intense struggle with heritage, identity or history. I also like the nostalgic and fading quality of watercolor.

–Vivian Lopez Rowe

King Young-sook, trans. Janet Hong, At Night He Lifts Weights (Transit Books, November 14)
Design by Justin Carder

I love the energy of this cover. The whimsical type treatment paired with the bubbly illustration, shattered into pieces like a broken plate, is intriguing.

–Sarah Schulte

A clever way to depict a character on the cover, without really showing them. The illustration is gorgeous as is the movement of the type.

–Alicia Tatone

Helen Schulman, Lucky Dogs (Knopf, June 6)
Design by Janet Hansen

Such an evocative photograph and great use of negative space. This cover reminds me of Sofia Coppola (high praise in my book!).

–Kelly Winton

I love how there are so many parts of this cover that are uncomfortable—the empty space, the slightly misshapen square, the fidgeting hands and the handwritten text shoved right up against the title.

–Jamie Keenan

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories (Picador, June 6)
Design by Alex Merto; illustration by Tim Lahan

I love that the text almost isn’t present (graceful as it is)—the illustration maxes out the visual space and the touch of blood signals the story before you even read the title. Keen and gorgeous.

–Alban Fischer

A redesign of a classic that feels both timeless and yet entirely new. Tim Lahan’s illustration is the perfect nod to the titular story.

–Alicia Tatone

Mona Awad, Rouge (S&S/Marysue Rucci, September 12)
Design by Oliver Munday

Love the intriguing dream-like head of the rose / jellyfish combination.

–Holly Ovenden

The novel itself descends into a frightening yet irresistible world, so fusing a jellyfish with a rose is a stroke of genius. Both are beautiful, yet both can inflict pain—one with its tendrils, the other with its thorns. The lush type treatment furthers the seduction.

–Devin Grosz

Tezer Özlü, tr. Maureen Freely, Cold Nights of Childhood (Transit Books, May 2)
Design by Sarah Schulte

So original and elegant. I love the flowing placement of the type and how it works with the illustration.

–Anna Morrison

Such a sweet, whimsical illustration with a surprise pop of color in the vessel. Love the unusual composition.

–Linda Huang

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born? (Astra House, September 5)
Design by Rodrigo Corral, 3D illustration by Danny Jones

I’ve always been drawn to covers that pose a question to the reader, and this one is quite literally full of them. The insistent repetition of the title question, the unnatural pastel flowers rising to obscure the words from view—gorgeous and unnerving.

–Devin Grosz

A brilliant and beautiful image that seems indeed to be a perfect marriage of poetry, art and tech and that draws the viewer in enough to inspire a win for design and for the team and author who approved this, as the title is parsed slightly more slower than most covers out there today. Refreshing.

–Nicole Caputo

Harald Voetmann, tr. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, Sublunar (New Directions, August 1)
Design by Jamie Keenan

Looks good, smells even better.

–Erik Carter

The title streaming down from the nostrils is a nice (yet slightly gross) touch—this cover is wacky in the best way.

–Stephanie Ross

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (FSG, March 7)
Design by Jon Gray

Amazing movement and depth . . . the hand-drawn, edgy quality screams thriller.

–Kimberly Glyder

This cover has a great sense of movement. It’s easy to imagine the type, trees, and drone on the cusp of being swept away in the wind.

–Stephanie Ross

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books, July 11)
Design and illustration by Jonathan Bush

The attention to detail in this illustration is astonishing. The entire cover is dangerous and lush.

–Laywan Kwan

I love a twisted still life! The venus fly traps, the skull, the spilled coffee—every sinister detail is spot on.

–Alison Forner

Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get From You (MCD x FSG Originals, June 14)
Design by Thomas Colligan

It’s just… perfect. I don’t know what else to say. It’s perfect! Makes me want to be a fifteen-year-old girl again.

–Alicia Tatone

10/10 perfect execution.

–June Park

Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Michael Hofmann, Kairos (New Directions, June 6)
Design by John Gall

This one forces you keep trying to work out what exactly is going on and noticing another new bit.

–Jamie Keenan

Beautiful, ominous.

–Mark Abrams

Ida Vitale, tr. Sarah Pollack, Time Without Keys (New Directions, September 4)
Design by Tyler Comrie

So tender and edgy. If Tyler did this in Photoshop, it’s just brilliantly executed.

–Linda Huang

Sings.

–Mark Abrams

Robert Plunket, My Search for Warren Harding (New Directions, June 6)
Design by Oliver Munday

Food for thought!

–Erik Carter

So Monty Python. The way you see just under a half of Harding’s rueful eye peering out at the reader, .

–Mark Abrams

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase (Vintage Classics [UK], March 8)
Design by Suzanne Dean; illustration by Tatsuro Kiuchi

The full series.

Suzanne Dean’s designs for the reissues of the Murakami series (illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi) are so unique, eye catching, and captured the spirit of Murakami’s writing so beautifully.

–Anna Morrison

This design of this series is a celebration of Japanese illustration, reflecting the narrative in a colourful and playful way, and the obi wrap-around is inspired. Any Murakami fan would be ecstatic to receive this series.

–Kishan Rajani

Will Hermes, Lou Reed: The King of New York (FSG, October 3)
Design by No Ideas

My favorite part of this half-jacket, pre-printed case combo is how “Lou Reed” peaks out from behind the jacket, like a crown on top of Lou Reed’s head.

–Stephen Brayda

The case for simplicity.

–Tyler Comrie

Claudia Dey, Daughter (FSG, September 12)
Design by June Park

Having this much black and then this loud pop of color is such a bold choice. It feels so much like a movie poster.

–Vivian Lopez Rowe

The simplicity, contrast, and overall vintage quality of type and design really resonates. It’s one of those simple and effective covers, where you say…why didn’t I think of that??? But I didn’t….June Park did, and it’s stunning!

–Pete Garceau

Adam Mars-Jones, Caret (Faber & Faber [UK], August 17)
Design by Jonathan Pelham

The full series.

There’s something about the hierarchy of the type that feels wrong—it took me a moment to distinguish the title from the author, but that’s the type of rule-breaking that makes this so memorable and confident. I didn’t realize that this book was part of a series, which makes it all the more compelling. The sophisticated color combo is also winning.

–Linda Huang

Not easy to make a typographic series design feel as fresh and as striking as this. There’s retro nod which I love.

–Luke Bird

Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child (FSG, September 5)
Design by Na Kim

I love Na’s covers for Yiyun Lee. Everything feels so considered.

–Grace Han

I love the bold interruption of the pregnant pear shape into that charming dog painting.

–Lucy Kim

Yu Miri, tr. Morgan Giles, The End of August (Riverhead, August 1)
Design by Lauren Peters-Collaer; art by Seahyun Lee

I love these colors together. It’s such a contemporary choice and the contrast to the traditional imagery in the painting adds so much depth.

–Vivian Lopez Rowe

I love that red and pink combo. The combination of traditionalism and modernity is really striking.

–Emily Mahon

Steven Millhauser, Disruptions (Knopf, August 1)
Design by Janet Hansen; illustration by Dylan C. Lathrop

What’s not to love about this cover? It’s engaging, striking, and uses eyes in a way that’s never been done before (which is no small feat when it comes to book covers).

–Pete Garceau

I mean who couldn’t love all those teeny tiny eyes? She found the perfect piece of art for this!

–Lucy Kim

Wendy Cope, The Orange (Faber & Faber [UK], November 9
Design by Pete Adlington“At lunchtime I bought a huge orange, the size of it made us all laugh”. The naivety and simplicity of this cover speaks so aptly to the beautiful prose of Wendy’s poem, I love it, I’m glad it exists.

–Kishan Rajani

Somehow a perfect blend of nostalgia, wit and design balance. The clashing palette works so well.

–Luke Bird

Noreen Masud, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [UK], April 27)
Design by Josie Stanley Taylor
Again it’s the clever use of space and colour that make this cover so appealing. An unusual colour palette.

–Jon Gray

Boo Trundle, The Daughter Ship (Pantheon, June 27)
Design by Jenny Carrow

The illustration and type feel spontaneous and fresh. I’m intrigued by these figures in a hot tub/boat. What are they scoping out?

–Emily Mahon

Megan Kamalei, Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, August 29)
Design by Jaya Miceli

Lush and beautiful. It feels intriguing, raw and emotional. It really draws you in.

–Yang Kim

Pratchi Gupta, They Called Us Exceptional (Crown, August 22)
Design by Arsh Raziuddin

This cover speaks to this subject matter so succinctly and emotively—from the perfect placement of the bindi and the sharpness of the Kajal, it speaks to the idea of the ideal Indian woman and wider expectations of the model minority. It’s brilliant.

–Kishan Rajani

Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book (FSG, November 7)
Design by Thomas Colligan

A charming collection of fonts and shapes.

–Tyler Comrie

Harold Rogers, Tropicália (Atria, July 18)
Design by Laywan Kwan

The artwork is gorgeous and the color and type work so beautifully together.

–Lucy Kim

Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, November 7)
Design by Will Staehle

–Allison Saltzman

I.S. Barry, The Peacock and the Sparrow (Atria, May 30)
Design by Claire Sullivan

Love me a good spy cover! Type, color, perspective, and figure placement are all spot on.

–James Iacobelli

Iliana Regan, Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir (Agate, January 24)
Design by Morgan Krehbiel

I just completely lose myself in the gills of this mushroom.

–Mark Abrams

Irina Zhorov, Lost Believers (Scribner, August 1)
Design by Emily Mahon

I love the dimensional collaged overlay with the hand lettered type. Beautifully executed.

–Jaya Miceli

Alison Mills Newman, Francisco (New Directions, March 7)
Design by Joan Wong

–Anna Kochman

Zahra Hankir, Eyeliner: A Cultural History (Penguin Books, November 14)
Design by Lynn Buckley

This could have easily fallen into a predictable trap, but Lynn took a completely unexpected approach and turned it into a work of art.

–Alison Forner

Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals (Tin House, June 6)
Design by Beth Steidle, art by Lisa Ericson

Absolutely beautiful art by Lisa Ericson and the minimal type with subtle gradient does a great job at toggling between the foreground and background without distracting from the art and its message.

–Nicole Caputo

Erica Berry, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron, February 21)
Design by Keith Hayes; illustration by Rokas Aleliunas

I love how bold, evocative, and graphic this cover is—a real standout in the nonfiction world.

–Beth Steidle

Melissa Bank, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (Viking [UK], May 18)
Design by Annie AtkinsI was super excited to see that Annie Atkins had been commissioned by Saffron Stocker to bring her talents to book covers. Because if you know her work, you know that each of these patches were painstakingly designed and made in real life. Annie’s design process and philosophies are an inspiration in a time of “quick” Photoshop and AI generative art.

–Lauren Harms

Manon Garcia, The Joy of Consent (Belknap Press, October 3)
Design by Jaya Miceli

Who knew a gradient could be so sexy?! Love how the type just barely touches the shape.

–Jenny Carrow

Eliot Duncan, Ponyboy (Footnote Press [UK], June 8)
Design by Luke Bird
It’s possible I am especially vulnerable to the Melty Look.

–Mark Abrams

Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine, April 25)
Design and illustration by Holly Ovenden

The attitude of this design—the figure itself, yes, but also the scale and interaction with the gorgeous typography—is simply everything.

–Morgan Krehbiel

Sandra Newman, Julia (Mariner Books, October 24)
Design by Luke Bird

I love a typographic cover and this one works so well. The way 1984 is almost peering over the title, as a looming presence is so impactful.

–Kishan Rajani

Fernanda Melchor, tr. Sophie Hughes, This is Not Miami (New Directions, April 4)
Design by Jamie Keenan

Jamie is always good at finding new ways of saying things. This captures streets at night and I love the use of colour.

–Jon Gray

Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea (Bloomsbury, May 30)
Design by Mia Kwon and Patti Ratchford; illustration by Yuko Shimizu

The illustration is incredible! I love it when there are different levels of information in a design. This works on both a detailed micro level with the waves and the ship, and a macro level with the face.

–Laywan Kwan

Joshua Bennett, Spoken Word (Knopf, March 28)
Design by Tom Etherington

Great texture and craft.

–Tyler Comrie

Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty (Dutton, April 4)
Design by Kristin Del Rosario

I think I remember my mouth uncontrollably popping open the first time I saw this one—it’s just so unique. And those pokes!

–Zoe Norvell

Stephen King, Holly (Scribner, September 5)
Design by Will Staehle

Understated creepiness, with glow in the dark spot gloss. What’s not to love!

–James Iacobelli

Guy Gunaratne, Mister Mister (Pantheon, October 3)
Design by Jack Smyth

I love the energy and punk rock feel of the type and illustration.

–Jaya Miceli

Delia Cai, Central Places (Ballantine, January 31)
Design by Cassie Gonzales

So much warmth and spirit.

–Anna Kochman

Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC (Penguin Press, October 3)
Design by Bennett Miller / DALL-E 2

Haunting. Of note, from the back flap: “the image on this jacket was created by Bennett Miller, using OpenAl’s DALL-E 2 software. He arrived at the final product by making extensive edits on variations of an image generated using the following prompt: ‘a vintage photograph of huge plumes of smoke coming from an enormous UFO crashed in the desert.'”

–Mark Abrams

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You (Viking, February 21)
Design by Elizabeth Yaffe

Creative way to turn type into imagery.

–Yeon Kim

Janika Oza, A History of Burning (Grand Central Publishing, May 2)
Design by Albert Tang; illustration by Simone Noronha

There is something wonderfully magnetic and lush in this illustration. It feels both classic and contemporary. And I love the unconventional framing typography. Looks fantastic in person and on screen.

–Lauren Harms

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Del Rey, July 18)
Design by Regina Flath

Super commercial and super good! I love the details like the sloping title and the screen on the image.

–Jamie Keenan

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch (Knopf, September 19)
Designed by Kelly Blair

I love the pairing of this historical illustration with modern hand lettering.

–Laywan Kwan

Robert Peckham, Fear (Profile Books [UK], September 7)
design by Tom Etherington

This eerie, funny-creepy design gives me 2024 vibes right now.

–Mark Abrams

Classic Ghost Stories (Vintage Classics, March 1)
Design by Andrew Davis

The level of detail that Andrew puts into his covers, blows me away. The way the beautifully illustrated crow fills the cover and the red ribbon that flows through it all, is just perfect.

–Pete Garceau

Andrew Lipstein, The Vegan (FSG, July 11)
Design by Cecilia R. Zhang

I love the humor of the illustration contrasting the title and the simplicity of the composition. It looks vintage yet contemporary, and the neon green is so fun.

–Jaya Nicely

Jacqueline Crooks, Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape [UK], March 2)
Design by Jodi Hunt
This cover is energetic and eye-catching. The integration of 80s inspired typography and image has been executed beautifully and I can’t help but to be drawn to this cover.

–Kishan Rajani

Dolki Min, tr. Victoria Caudle, Walking Practice (HarperVia, March 14)
Cover art by Dolki Min

There’s so many layers to this cover. I love that the art and text come together, making this a unique cover. No idea what’s going on, but I’m intrigued.

–Yeon Kim

Christine Grillo, Hestia Strikes a Match (FSG, April 18)
Design by Na Kim

I’ve been obsessed with this cover since the moment I saw it.

–Cassie Gonzales

Isabel Zapata, tr. Robin Myers, In Vitro (Coffee House Press, May 9)
Design by Zoe Norvell

I am struck by this cover every time I see it. The color palette and the image so perfectly capture the strangeness, interiority, and otherness of what happens within our own bodies.

–Beth Steidle

Ismail Kadare, tr. John Hodgson, A Dictator Calls (Counterpoint, September 19)
Design by Farjana Yasmin

–Allison Saltzman

Andrea Dunlop, Women Are The Fiercest Creatures (Zibby Books, March 7)
Design by Olga Grlic

Amazing combination of title and art.

–James Iacobelli

Hannah Michell, Excavations (One World, July 11)
Design by Arsh Raziuddin

When I look at this my eyes just yoyo backwards and forwards between the title and young kids and It’s a great use of empty space.

–Jamie Keenan

DK Nnuro, What Napoleon Could Not Do (Riverhead, February 7) Design by Lauren Peters-Collaer; art by Amoako Boafo

Lauren’s hand lettering pairs so beautifully with Amoako Boafo’s art.

–Grace Han

Henry Hoke, Open Throat (MCD, June 6)
Design by Rodrigo Corral

Captivating Rorschach-esque art with hidden elements begs to be picked up.

–Yeon Kim

Athena Dixon, The Loneliness Files (Tin House, October 3)
Design by Beth Steidle

This cover perfectly captures the paradox of urban loneliness. Also, the attention to craft on this cover is remarkable—the imperfect rectangles and the slightly off-center circles all come together to give it that midcentury modern flavour…an homage to a time when the Align-Window didn’t exist.

–Cecilia Zhang

Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press [UK], July 13)
Design by Holly OvendenSuch a dexterous balance of movement, color, and type. The spilling hinted at is clever and sensuous. I’ve been transfixed by this cover since I first saw it.

–Alban Fischer

Lauren Beukes, Bridge (Mullholland, August 8)
Design by Kirin Diemont

This edition takes a conventional sci-fi-thriller look and throws it out the window. Love those colors!

–Zoe Norvell

Sheila Heti, Pure Colour (FSG, February 13)
Design by Na Kim

What Na Kim did with this cover was take one of the most direct cover designs possible while still leaving room for ambiguity with a giant Ellsworth Kelly blob.

–Erik Carter

Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent (Flatiron, January 10)
Design by Keith Hayes; art by Sasha Vinogradova

Love how the art—unsettling and beautiful at the same time—gets to shine here. Seamless type integration, pearl finish, and sculpture emboss make this a really striking package.

–Jamie Stafford-Hill

A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton (Granta Books [UK], September 21)
Design by Jo WalkerLove Jo Walker’s design for The Glutton. It’s so fun.

–Anna Morrison

Yasunari Kawabata, The Rainbow (Vintage, November 7)
Design by John Gall

Trippy. What was this guy smokin’ when he made this?

–Tyler Comrie

Sally Wen Mao, The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 1)
Design by Kapo Ng; art by Ah Xian

I first saw this cover on display in my local bookstore, and literally stopped mid-conversation to run across the room for a closer look. Something about the restraint in the design is just so exciting.

–Morgan Krehbiel

Jessica Johns, Bad Cree (Doubleday, January 10)
Design by Emily Mahon

What a pairing of type and image! The typography is really fantastic and lends sophistication. Love the simplicity.

–Lauren Harms

Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture (Black Cat, January 24)
Design by Kelly Winton

The layered views offer a glimpse into a confused world, while the serene color palette and structured type balance out the chaos.

–Kimberly Glyder

Reggie Watts, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again (Tiny Reparations Press, October 17)
Design by Ben Denzer

This cover is bonkers and brilliant!

–Jenny Carrow

Sara Gran, Come Closer (Soho Press, September 26)
Design by Caroline Johnson

LOVE LOVE LOVE everything about this cover!!

–James Iacobelli

Vauhini Vara, This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton, September 26)
Design by Keith Hayes

A clean and heartbreaking design. I like how the windswept flower appears to force the type further and further apart.

–Beth Steidle

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (FSG, August 15)
Design by Na Kim

Perfect, as always.

–Lauren Peters-Collaer

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (Astra House, October 17)
Design by Alicia Tatone

I love how this one asks you to look closer.

–Anna Kochman

Keith Rosson, Fever House (Random House, August 15)
Design by Ella Laytham

A perfectly balanced cover that only gets better the closer you look at the textures and details.

–Cassie Gonzales

Sam Sax, Pig (Scribner, September 19)
Design by Matt Dorfman

The negative space, the colors, the Paul Rand-esque illustration—Matt can do no wrong.

–Alicia Tatone

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (Penguin Press, January 17)
Design by Rick Rubin + Pentagram

Simple, daring, and brave enough to take risks (no quotes, sticker barcode) like Rubin himself.

–Stephen Brayda

Andrew Ridker, Hope (Viking, July 11)
Design by Tyler Comrie

An excellent photograph that pairs perfectly with the title. Humorous and sentimental.

–Kelly Winton

Djuna, tr. Anton Hur, Counterweight (Pantheon, July 11)
Design by Tal Goretsky

Love the colors and surreal quality of this cover. That eyeball!

–Jaya Miceli

Mary Ziegler, Roe: The History of a National Obsession (Yale University Press, January 24)
Design by Alex Camlin

It’s so incredibly hard to create something fresh and unexpected for books like these. I love how this captures the raw energy of one of the most important issues of our time. It feels urgent and unbridled.

–Alison Forner

Daljit Nagra, Indiom (Faber & Faber [UK], September 7)
Design by Kishan Rajani
I’m always mesmerized by Rajani’s use of color. Here, everything just snaps with such precision and verve. And the texture lends a real warmth.

–Alban Fischer

Herman Hesse, tr. Kurt Beals, The Steppenwolf (W.W. Norton, January 3)
Design by Jaya Miceli

Something about the unsettled energy of the illustration and type just grabs me. Plus, it’s a wolf in a suit.

–Jamie Stafford-Hill

Maya Binyam, Hangman (FSG, August 8)
Design by Alex Merto; art by Belkis Ayón

AMAZING art by Belkis Ayón.

–Anna Morrison

Michele Mari, tr. Brian Robert Moore, You, Bleeding Childhood (And Other Stories, August 8)
Design by Holly Ovenden

Such an imaginative take on a wunderkammer. I love how the illustrated elements are falling playfully against the structured type.

–Grace Han

Tatsuhiko Ishii, tr. Hiroaki Sato, Bathhouse and Other Tanka (New Directions, November 7)
Design by Oliver Munday

Love the contrast between the zoomed-in intimate photograph and small-scale digital type.

–Janet Hansen

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Our Share of Night (Hogarth Press, September 12)
Design by Donna Cheng

The yellow of the nails and typography pops off this jacket in person.

–Zoe Norvell

Zechen Xu, tr. Eric Abrahamsen and Jeremy Tiang, Beijing Sprawl (Two Lines Press, June 13)
Design by Andrew Walters

I mean, yeah.

–Mark Abrams

Saba Alemayoh, Tekebash & Saba (Interlink Books, April 4)

The textures and patterns lend such a rich and warm sense of place to this cookbook. Cookbook industry, please take notes.

–Morgan Krehbiel

Nora Roberts, Inheritance (St. Martin’s Press, November 21)
Design by Ervin Serrano

Shouting out a category normally not on people’s radar. Love the mood and composition here, not to mention the swash on the N!

–James Iacobelli

Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese (Feminist Press, September 12)
Design by Dana Li

The hole punches are such an efficient way of adding a sense of fleeting moments, memories and partially processed feelings to a cover that is essentially just a very simple typeface and an image.

–Vivian Lopez Rowe

Daniel Nayeri, The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams (Levine Querido, March 7)
Design by Stephen Brayda; art by Daniel Miyares

I love every bit of this cover—the brushstrokes in the type, the color palette, the little shadow characters, and the stars at the top.

–Cassie Gonzales

Joe Coscarelli, Rap Capital: an Atlanta Story (Simon & Schuster, October 10)
Design by Chips

mic drop

–June Park

Joyce Carol Oates, Zero-Sum (Fourth Estate [UK], July 20)
Design by Julian HumphriesSo simple and yet so arresting. It infuses the familiarness and distance of the image with a degree of uncanniness and allure. I’m a little jealous, actually.

–Alban Fischer

Emma Donoghue, Learned by Heart (Little, Brown, August 29)
Design by Lucy Kim

There is so much texture in this cover! The concentric circles bring my eye right to the center. I also find it refreshing to see a historical fiction cover that doesn’t rely on setting or fashion.

–Laywan Kwan

Emma Cline, The Guest (Random House, May 16)
Design by Oliver Munday

Feels both vintage and entirely modern. Always appreciate Oliver Munday’s designs.

–Kelly Winton

Anna Metcalfe, Chrysalis (Granta Books [UK], May 4)
Design by Jack Smyth
There is something so loose and appealing about the lines in the illustration.

–Tom Etherington

Percival Everett, Dr. No (Influx Press [UK], March 16)
Design by Jamie Keenan
It’s just so strange and fun and intriguing, definitely makes me want to know more about the book.

–Jamie Stafford-Hill

Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon (37 Ink, October 3)
Design by Rex Bonomelli

The lettering and graphic illustration create the perfect tension for this memoir about the author’s strict Rastafarian upbringing.

–Kimberly Glyder

Mia Couto, tr. David Brookshaw, The Drinker of Horizons (FSG, March 14)
Design by June Park

It’s amazing how the ship in the far distance pulls you right in.

–Zoe Norvell

Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (Other Press, March 28)
Main image courtesy of the author; background image Private Collection (credit symbol) Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images

The layering of elements is so beautifully executed here. The push-and-pull between foreground and background ask some questions while drawing me in—to me, the ultimate bar for a memoir cover.

–Morgan Krehbiel

Alice McDermott, Absolution (FSG, October 31)
Design by Alex Merto

This one must be seen in person. The special effects are stunning.

–Jenny Carrow

Miranda West, ed., The Book of Do (Do Book Co, August 8)
Design by Tom Etherington; illustrations by James Victore

So elegant and also playful. Such a sweet and tender design.

–Kelly Winton

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen (FSG, October 24)
Design by June Park

Park’s type work is always so cozy and considered. And that big field of oversaturated red! The muchness this cover achieves with such economy is nothing short of wizardry.

–Alban Fischer

Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice (Riverhead Books, January 3)
Design by Gregg Kulick

A jolt of energy.

–Kimberly Glyder

Jinwoo Chong, Flux (Melville House, March 21)
Design by Beste Miray Doğan

Love this. Excellent contrasts with that bright yellow, huge sharp black type, organic/digital liquid splash. Still fresh and eye catching every time I see it. (Also, gotta appreciate a four letter word on two lines.)

–Jamie Stafford-Hill

Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans (University Press of Kentucky, June 20)
Design by Jaya Miceli

So impactful. I love how emotive the painterliness is here.

–Lauren Peters-Collaer

Marie Ndiaye, Vengeance is Mine (Quercus Publishing [UK], October 26)
Design by Jack Smyth
The interplay of weird shadowy shapes and the type got me.

–Mark Abrams

Tariq Trotter, The Upcycled Self (One World, November 14)
Design by Greg Mollica; collage by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

This cover speaks to how prolific Black Thought is, and the depth of his music and his story. The modern and fresh collage is spot-on.

–Emily Mahon

David James Duncan, Sun House (Little, Brown, August 8)
Design by Lucy Kim

A big deal book with a big look cover. What sets this jacket apart for me is that while there are big graphic elements, there are also really fine details. Simple and striking.

–Lauren Harms

Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, March 14)
Design by Tree Abraham

One thing about me? I simply love a collage. And the weirder the better.

–Morgan Krehbiel

When I was eleven years old, I did an unforgivable thing: I set my family photos on fire. We were living in Saigon at the time, and as Viet Cong tanks rolled toward the edge of the city, my mother, half-crazed with fear, ordered me to get rid of everything incriminating.

Obediently, I removed pictures from the album pages, diplomas from their glass frames, film reels from metal canisters, letters from desk drawers. I put them all in a pile in the backyard and lit a match. When I was done, the mementos of three generations had turned into ashes.

Only years later in America did I begin to regret the act. A few pictures survived because my older brother, who was a foreign student, had taken them with him. But why didn’t I save the rest, the way I slipped my stamp collection in my backpack hours before we boarded the C-130 cargo plane and headed for Guam? For years I could not look at friends’ family photo albums without feeling remorse.

Then last week I had a dream that was so instructive it left me with a different estimation of that loss. In the dream, I find myself once more in front of my old home in Saigon. I walk through the rusted iron gate to find, to my horror, the place gutted—an empty structure where once there was life and love.

Immediately, I start to rummage among the pile of broken bricks and fallen plasters, finding, at last, a nightstand that once belonged to my mother. I pull at its drawer and out spill dozens of black-and-white photos. I am ecstatic. The photos are intact.

They are exactly as I remember them. Here’s one of my brother when he was twelve, wearing his martial art uniform and bowing to the camera. Here’s one of my mother as a teenager, posing next to the ruins of Angkor Wat. Here is my father as a young and handsome colonel, smoking a cigar. And me and my sister holding onto our dogs—Medor and Nina—as we wave to the photographer, smiling happily.

Suddenly a little boy appears in the dream. “This is my home,” he yells, “and you’re trespassing.”

“But these are my photos,” I meekly protest.

The boy looks at me with suspicion and shrewdness and changes his tone. “Well,” he says, “how much would you give me for these photos?”

But before I can find the answer, the boy laughs and snatches the photos out of my hand. I try to grab them back of course, but it’s too late.

I woke to find my arm still reaching out over the blanket in a gesture toward the pictures, still trying to retrieve them. Confused and astonished, I stared at my own empty hand for what seemed to be a long, long time. In that salty dawn with the cable cars rumbling up the hills and their bells clanging merrily outside my window, I saw what I hadn’t seen before: that nothing was ever truly lost.

What I failed to retrieve in the dream survives, if only as an exquisite longing. If words and language, as the poet Rilke tells us, can be made into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator, the reverse is true also.

Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.

–Andrew Lam

*

Ambush in the Leaf, 2007 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Untitled #4, 2009 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Waiting, 2009 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Archival Family Photograph, c. early 1978 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Archival Family Photograph, c. early 1978 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Archival Family Photograph, c. 1966 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Archival Family Photograph, c. 1981 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

Immigration Paperwork, c. 1979 © Binh Danh, from Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging © Radius Books.

__________________________________

From Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging. Photography by Binh Danh. Texts by Binh Danh, Boreth Ly, Joshua Chuang, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, and Andrew Lam. Copyright © 2023. Available from Radius Books.

“Why Is the Sky Blue and Other Questions Regarding Writing” was originally published in Documents, no. 7 (Fall 1996): 16–19. A version of this paper was given at the panel “The Voices of Criticism,” organized by Janet Kraynak and held at Basilico Fine Arts, New York, on June 27, 1996.

*

As a question, “What is criticism?” is on par with “Why is the sky blue?” I know I know the answer, but I can never remember it. When confronted with the question, I often experience a kind of sputtering effect; my sentences become punctuated with “and” and “but.” So my remarks here will operate in that manner: they will take the form of numbered ruminations, the conjunctions between which may be somewhat associative.

1. I never describe myself as an art critic or a cultural critic, although I have performed acts that people associate with those roles. I like to think of myself as a writer before any other institutional affiliation. I write in large part because I love to read. I love reading because I like to experience how other people’s minds work. This is also, by the way, why I like art. I write something that corresponds to the term criticism because it is often the best way to figure out what I think. I tend to write about things that I don’t fully understand because writing helps me to understand them better. I also write about things I love. I have a bad habit of falling in love with art objects.

2. The writing that appeals to me the most tends to capture a series of seemingly opposed terms. Doing so, it seems to acknowledge some of the problems bound up in the notion of criticism. I am drawn to writing that embodies the texture of the everyday but also has an acute sense of the historical (and because it seems appropriate to name names, I will give examples as I go; here, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station). I like writing that straddles the divide between subjective immersion in the material and a more traditional sense of objectivity between itself and its object of inquiry, writing that exhibits a personal sensibility, yet is also somewhat aloof (Leo Steinberg’s essay “Other Criteria,” Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida). I prefer criticism that is generative of questions and possibilities to criticism that is prohibitive or corrective (Miwon Kwon and Dave Hickey).

What I desire most from criticism, and is often the hardest thing to find, is writing that is highly tuned to the problematics of the relational. By this I mean writing that is aware of the difficulties of positing and/or describing the relations between art objects, their makers, their historical conditions of possibility, and their various interlocutors. In other words, work that pays close attention to what happens when you put something called theory or history next to something called an art object (Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines, Carol Armstrong’s Odd Man Out, Molly Nesbit’s essays on Duchamp). This is to suggest what criticism is, for me.

3. Terry Eagleton begins his book The Function of Criticism with the assertion that criticism has no function. He argues that criticism developed as a form of protest against an absolutist state, and that its historical transformations have tended to be intertwined with changing systems and formations of power and state apparatuses. In other words, criticism has an intimate relation to the public sphere, both making it possible and helping to bring about its demise. Eagleton ends his book by stating that while criticism currently has no function, it must create one for itself, and that its task should be to fight the bourgeois state.

The problem with this argument and others like it is that we don’t live in a bourgeois state. The terms of our world are structured by multinational global conglomerate capital. There is, in this regard, no public sphere (in the broadly Habermasian terms in which Eagleton understands it) for criticism to operate in or against. This may be one of the reasons for the development of cultural studies, an academic interdiscipline which sets out to examine the “anti-public sphere” of the entertainment industry. The impulse behind cultural studies is not wrong, especially the notion that consumers can be active rather than simply passive participants in their culture. The problem is that cultural studies has largely taken as its field an extremely narrow, albeit incredibly popular, segment of cultural expression. It sees popularity or numbers as generating interest as such. In so doing, it frames practices that have smaller fields of interest, expertise, or constituents as either elitist or uninteresting. Or, conversely, cultural studies discourse has tended to privilege the marginal as such, assuming a kind of inherent radicality in subcultural or youth culture formations.

Unfortunately, many art historians and critics feel threatened by the development of cultural studies (an anxiety felt in other disciplines as well). Certainly art magazines have turned to fashion and everything under the sun but art in order to be as hip as cultural studies. This is slightly confusing, given the fact that art is more popular now than ever before. Even though the culture wars are evil and ridiculous, they have focused an incredible amount of energy on art. And we need only think of the Vermeer and Cézanne shows, and the use of contemporary art in city festivals and tourist junkets, to see how “in demand” art is at the moment. These developments should not be read merely as cynical, corporate-sponsored gestures designed to dupe the public through an elaborate public relations ruse.

They are that, of course, but the public is also flocking to see “art.” And while we need to remain aware of what “use” art is put to, if we imagine it put to no use or not open for ideological manipulation, then perhaps we have imagined art to exist in a separate sphere after all. But both cultural studies and art specialists have made a common error, of not seeing the interrelations between various manifestations of visual culture. We have set up an either/or situation instead of an apparatus that is able, or willing, to account for “both.”

4. Historically, America has been suspicious of intellectuals. Leo Steinberg has argued that American artists have often wanted to be seen as “workers,” doing everything they could to distance themselves from the notion of “art.” Critics have been similar, billing themselves as “cultural workers” and preaching high political value for their articles. This means we have not embraced terms like uncertainty or failure in our writing or in the way we approach objects and problems. We want to explain, to convince, more than we want to ask questions or pose problems.

Given the absence of a viable public sphere, the task may not be to resuscitate an older, corrective model of criticism but to be more open and inventive in our current approaches to culture, for its terms, too, have changed dramatically. And if in fact criticism has no function, then perhaps we shouldn’t try to defend it on the grounds of functionality. After all, do acts of interpretation need to be justified as such? Do we need to make huge claims for the status or function of criticism?

5. We live in a culture that rewards stupidity and mediocrity. We live in a nation of increasing homogeneity and “surburbification.” We live in a culture that equates being smart with being elitist. We live in a country, and especially this state and city, that has no regard for education. In my (relatively short) lifetime, I have seen the dismantling of public and state school systems, as well as federal aid to students. This has been accompanied by the rise of the star academic, whose major concern is not pedagogy but, borrowing terminology from the sciences, “research” (i.e., the lecture circuit). These phenomena have contributed to the intense isolation of academic debates and concerns, as well as the sense of threat or danger felt on many campuses by humanities programs. (Perhaps the “crisis” or “threat” of “interdisciplinarity” is a straw man in this regard, a stand-in for the real possibility—indeed, actuality—of disciplinary elimination, in the form of the wholesale cutting of departments.) Universities have for the most part stopped teaching students how to think, let alone think critically, and instead have opted for preparing them for vocations. The university has become, in large degree, a training center.

What is to be done? A lot and not much. I think we live in a period in which the Big Questions are not so productive. I think we live in an era of the small gesture. In the Jewish faith, people are supposed to make a mitzvah every day. A mitzvah is a good deed, for in Judaism the task of faith is to make the world we live in a better place, not to put all our effort toward an afterlife. In some senses I feel that criticism, art making, writing, and teaching are like mitzvahs. In a culture that actively promotes stupidity, to express a thought, to contribute to intellectual dialogue is itself a form of struggle against the status quo. But to allow that we might “contribute to intellectual dialogue” is in some way to posit a public sphere that earlier I said doesn’t really exist. Contradiction. The traditional public sphere doesn’t exist; neither does the role of public intellectual. So we have to recognize, on one hand, that when we write or make art we do so in and for microcommunities, at best. On the other hand, we have to recognize that our little communities are part of the culture, that they overlap with each other, and that our friends sometimes talk to people we don’t know.

To sum up, the first point that I would emphasize is that for me the series of “crises” posed by the fall of criticism, the rise of interdisciplinarity, the isolation of the art world, etc., can be traced back to the larger problem of the lack of importance education has in our culture in general. The second is that to say that what I do (write, and write criticism) has no function is not necessarily to say something cynical. I often experience this with great freedom: if it has no function, then I can do what I want with it. But then, I’m not the only person involved; usually there is an artist (and if they are alive you can count on at least one reader). To take this into consideration generates a certain obligation to write with respect and kindness, terms that in the last instance I find much more compelling than “criticism.”

POSTSCRIPT

I quit smoking (three packs a day) cold turkey the day after my thirtieth birthday, making this the first essay I ever wrote as a nonsmoker. It was also written when I still assumed I would be a professor. In the ’90s, cultural studies, visual studies, and interdisciplinarity were some of the most charged buzzwords to be found in the university. They signaled a growing discontent with academic fields created in the eighteenth century, and a need for many to justify their “nontraditional” objects of study—ranging from television shows, vernacular photography, advertising imagery, and popular culture writ large. At the time, many of my professors were dismissive of these new ideas. I wasn’t particularly bothered. It seemed to me that as long as the writing about the thing was intelligent, then anything, and everything, could be an object of study. (This was for me the import of a writer such as Greg Tate, RIP.)

Today, I suppose, this might all seem a bit quaint, though I suspect that the structure of the opposition—which was largely generational—still exists. In other words, emergent generations can’t help but extend and discard the fights, language, and interests of their elders. Now that I am on the elder side of the equation, I endeavor to remember this now faded “crisis” of criticism when listening to my peers express their fears and anxieties about what will be lost as new forms of knowledge and new objects of study become ascendant.

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Excerpted from Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing about Art by Helen Molesworth. Copyright © 2023 by Helen Molesworth. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.

The first thing you notice about Laurie Anderson is her voice. Straight-forward and matter-of-fact, folksy and familiar, it is the voice of Middle America, earnestly asking what is happening to America.

Like many people, I first encountered Anderson’s voice in the song “O Superman.” Recorded in 1981, it features haunting snippets of plain-spoken electro poetry influenced by the recent hostage crisis in Iran. The song was as addictive as it was poignant, with Anderson’s heavily-processed voice saying “Ha” on a seemingly endless loop, layered over bird sounds and synths to create a hypnotic, almost childlike beat. Fellow artist B. George released the single on his small independent label, and it became an unlikely hit in the UK—and a favorite of the staff at WKCR.

Anderson grew up outside of Chicago and might have pursued a career as a concert violinist, but her curiosity brought her to New York, where she studied sculpture at Columbia University. In the 1970s, she began to make a name for herself with her experimental violin pieces and could be seen busking at the city’s subway stations, wearing ice skates attached to frozen blocks of ice while playing her violin. When the ice melted, her performance ended.

I met Anderson just as she was moving into a new loft space on Canal Street. Perhaps welcoming a distraction from unpacking boxes, she was warm and chatty, sitting crossed-legged on a temporary, fold-up chair. She was working on an upcoming project called United States, which she would stage as a vast, two-night, eight-hour show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

*

B. WENTZ: Before turning to music full time, you earned a graduate degree in sculpture here at Columbia.

LAURIE ANDERSON: I had a studio on 125th Street and was making stuff with polyurethane and polyvinyl. I got really sick doing it because of the fumes. It’s really toxic stuff. Lose a lot of brain cells that way. You have to wear a mask, gloves, and an asbestos suit, have exhaust fans going, and even if you are really careful, the fumes still get to you. So I stopped using that and started making things out of paper, crunching up the day’s newspapers and making it into a kind of brick papier maché—projects like that. I hated art school. I was asked to leave three times. Kicked out, reinstated. It was a really checkered career. I couldn’t stand it!

BW: You grew up in the suburbs west of Chicago, where you studied both visual art and violin. Did you stop playing while you focused on science in college and art in grad school?

LA: Yes, I started playing the violin when I was five years old.

Then when I was sixteen, I quit entirely. That’s one of the few things in life that I am really proud of—just being able to stop cold turkey—because I realized I was becoming a kind of technocrat, just learning to play accurately and very fast. It didn’t leave much room for anything other than practicing all day. There were other things I wanted to learn, so I stopped. Totally.

When I returned to the violin years later, I modified a lot of violins and used them as a kind of ventriloquist dummy or other kind of voice. I built one with a speaker inside and played it by itself. One has a battery-powered turntable on it, so I cut records for that. The needle of the record player is mounted on the middle of the violin bow and is lowered like a tonearm on a turntable.

BW: What does that sound like? Do you move it back and forth like a bow?

LA: It sounds pretty bad. Like barking seals. It’s very unpleasant. I also modified violins so they worked like tape instruments. I mounted a tape head on the bridge of the violin, and on the bow, instead of horsehair, there’s a strip of recorded audiotape, so you play that back and forth over the head. That allows you to create sounds that are backwards as well as forwards.

BW: What sort of music could you play like that? Is this the violin you invented?

LA: Bongos, saxophone, piano—whatever was recorded on the tape that I used as a bow. Generally, only a few phrases of those instruments. But by moving the bow, you can establish whole other kinds of rhythms. It’s just like editing tape—going back and forth until you find that sound. And I engineer a lot of my own tapes, so moving from that editing motion to the motion of playing a violin is not a great jump.

BW: It’s difficult to say what genre of music you make. You can’t say, “I make pop music” or “I make avant-garde music.” What do you call it?

LA: I think performance art. I thought that term was very clumsy when I first heard it. But it has the advantage of being very nonspecific. Nobody has a clear idea what that is. The closest definition of performance art is to say it’s a hybrid of a lot of things: images, language, gesture, sound, not quite theater, and not quite other things. Each time somebody does something within that general area and calls it performance art, it redefines the term in interesting ways. So I like it because it’s loose.

BW: In performance, you use these tapes and then add your own voice as well?

LA: Right. For violin, some are just tape sequences. The tapes I make for performances tend to be very dry. In other words, I don’t add reverb, and I don’t mix them in ways that are complicated at all—they are very simple rhythm tracks in which to make combinations. Making a record that exists only on audio tape is a very different process than performing. It’s a different way of thinking. Because without the pictures and the spatial aspects of the performance, you make different decisions about the music.

BW: Were you influenced by electronic music composers like Milton Babbitt, who also worked with atonal rhythms but on synthesizers? Or Harry Partch or George Crumb?

LA: I don’t like music made by machines that much. I prefer some kind of real signal to a filter. But at the same time, I try to have a balance between something made with a machine—magnetic tape—and something made by a human—a violin.

Electronics has filters—I don’t have the same feeling about it as electronics straight from the machine. A filter will act like a window, which shifts all the way up and looks at those harmonics and exaggerates them and brings them into the limited range of human hearing, so there are things you can guess at that are suddenly within your range, and that function of electronics is wonderful.

BW: I was amazed to see “O Superman” released on vinyl after hearing it performed at The Kitchen in Soho. It reached number two on the UK charts. Do you see this sort of popularity as a step forward?

LA: It’s hard to say. In the last two or three years, I’ve noticed a change in the audiences that come to see my work. They tend to be a very mixed group. There are some kids now, which I like a lot.

In terms of performance art being presented in a more pop way, I think it’s a mistake to try to nudge it into pop culture if it doesn’t have any kind of place. On the other hand, it has always been my fantasy that American artists could think of doing something like that because the avant-garde has been very snobbish. The whole history of it is generally a kind of ghetto of museums and art galleries and publications and a downtown scene, whether it’s clubs or venues or things like that. A certain attitude that involved a certain snobbism. Artists haven’t wanted anything to do with pop culture because it’s typically made for a ten-year-old brain, and most artists aren’t interested in working on that level. Why do it? Particularly here in the United States. Take pop music. It’s just a very tight system that is regulated by what the average listener wants to hear or what the average listener will be willing to put up with hearing. It’s not a DJ reaching into a bin and saying, “Well, here’s a record I’d like to play for you,” unless it’s like a college station. And it’s not that way in Europe. European radio is much more open. Particularly in Germany and England, people are freer to experiment in terms of what goes on the air. That makes a big difference.

I’ve gotten letters from DJs from big pop stations here in New York that said, “I just want to let you know, I did play your record and I received this photocopied letter from the station manager that says, ‘There is no playing of unauthorized material, i.e “O Superman.” ’” It’s very strange. Unless it’s on the playlist, it is not on the air. So you can produce whatever you want, but unless it falls into a certain category, only a limited number of people will hear it.

BW: Has the response to your music been greater in Europe than in the United States?

LA: About half the work I do is in Europe, and that’s been the case for about six years now, since 1976. It’s much easier to work there. Europeans care about things in a different kind of way. The audiences tend to be more general than here. You could never picture an American audience made up of as many different kinds of people as you see in Europe. The New York crowd does not mix. In Europe, you can see the Peking Opera and Robert Wilson on the same night.

BW: Your music seems to be very conceptual, in an American kind of way, with the things you say and the phrases you use. Avant-garde music tends to be conceptual too. But you use phrases that appear in everyday language—very direct and very American.

LA: Most of my phrases come from eavesdropping. I travel a lot, so I meet a lot of different kinds of people. My main goal is to use ordinary material so you can feel somebody is really talking to you, and not through any kind of music filter or lyric filter. One reason why I don’t typically use ABAB in verse-chorus arrangements is because real speech doesn’t fit very well into those structures. I like to create a stable, rhythmic ground that doesn’t move. It moves in a very limited way, over a very static ground and over which the language travels at its own speed. So you feel all the hesitations and riffs that you do when you talk. Talking is like improvisation, really, and those rhythms interest me much more than any kind of musical phrasing. So it is spoken language that dictates the shape of the music.

BW: In the seventies, you wrote art criticism for magazines. Do you still do any writing? I saw your book Hotel, which seemed to be excerpts from dream-like states.

LA: I have published a few texts from performances, and I have written things that are more or less notes for performances. I used to write the work first and then incorporate it into the performance, but I found it very static. So I tried to figure things out just by talking through them and then see how that felt. I worked on them by speaking through them.

BW: What are you working on now?

LA: The piece that I am working on now is called United States. It’s the result of being in Europe a lot. You sit around and have dinner with people who are going, “How could you have elected that guy president?” And you go, “Well, uh . . .” You have to come up with an answer, and I try to make up some good answers, but I realize that I have to think about it a little bit more. The final version will be produced next fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I wanted to play with some of the parts since I’ve been working on them since 1979.

BW: Some of us have seen parts of that piece at The Kitchen. I recall some visuals—big maps and lights. Will those be included in the BAM performance? Or will that strictly be a piece of music?

LA: A combination of both. And I hope that it doesn’t seem to be more of one than the other. I try to work sort of simultaneously on things, so for me, the danger is in being illustrational. You write a song and then you realize, wouldn’t some pictures be nice? It’s very tempting to just sort of illustrate the song rather than let the pictures have a whole other meaning that will add to the song rather than just sort of repeat it in the visual world. For me, that means working a lot slower because I go back and forth a lot between how the song looks and how it sounds. I’ve been working on United States for three years, and I had hoped that this would be the final version of the work, but I’m finding that I’m really more interested in adding parts to it than in sort of going back and perfecting things I’ve already done. So I’m frantically writing some new things for it now. I guess the best way to describe it is songs and stories with pictures. The whole thing is an attempt to describe a country, really.

BW: What will you use on stage?

LA: There will be a great big screen, 30 x 40 feet, because, to me, it’s very important that the image is very bright and visible from every place in the hall. So there’s a whole barrage of projectors: one that turns around and one that goes up and down, and a film projector and several slide projectors that have other kinds of motions to them. It’s a way of making a still picture move in ways other than you would normally do with film so that it has a kind of slower movement. If I take longer with a song, I’m not locked into the length of a film that accompanies it. So the technicians can, in a way, do a kind of collaboration with me in terms of the timing of it because it’s all done live and not in a studio and then put on film.

BW: Will there be any electronics involved? Or actors?

LA: I’d like to sort of feature the electronics rather than hide them, so they all sort of sit in a mound in the middle of the stage. And I do a lot of the turning of the dials myself, which is good because sometimes you can feel a little bit like a puppet if suddenly the whole electronic situation changes. So I like to have a certain amount of control of that. And there will be, I guess, ten people who will be in it, as well as me. There will be two saxophone players, a percussionist, and a bagpipe player. And a soprano, a keyboard player, and some people who talk, and some people who walk.

BW: How would you define avant-garde or /new music today?

LA: The nice thing about the word avant-garde is that it is constantly updating itself, and so is new music. For me, in a totally personal way, what I like the most is music that makes me feel most awake. I don’t care whether it’s new or not. An old Captain Beefheart album sounds newer to me than something I heard in a club last night.

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Excerpted from Transfigured New York: Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980-1990 by Brooke Wentz  Copyright © 2023 Brooke Wentz  Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.