Artist Monographs
These surveys celebrate boundary-pushing work in a variety of media from the 19th century through today.
Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History
Edited by Karli Wurzelbacher (Heckscher Museum of Art) $60
Neoclassical sculptor Stebbins (1815–1882) was the first woman to complete a public art commission in New York City: Angel of the Waters, atop Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain. In the book’s introduction, Tony Kushner writes that when he set the final scene of his 1991 play Angels in America at the fountain, he had “no idea that the Angel of the Waters was sculpted by a lesbian, the lifelong partner of the great American actress Charlotte Cushman.” Once forgotten, Stebbins is now the subject of a major exhibition at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, N.Y.
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes
Lauren Rosati (Metropolitan Museum of Art) $45
After working as a conceptual photographer for much of her 30-year career, Simpson first exhibited paintings at the 2015 Venice Bienniale, continuing an artistic practice that challenges notions of history, identity, and representation. This catalog showcases the last decade of work from the ever-evolving multimedia artist, whose paintings incorporate screen printing techniques, vivid color washes, and collages whose sources include midcentury Ebony and Jet magazines, vintage photography from polar expeditions, and a 1929 mineralogical encyclopedia.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
Edited by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes (Yale Univ.) $65
When Asawa (1926–2013) was a teenager, her Japanese American family was forcibly relocated to a World War II interment camp. After the war, she enrolled at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied with artist Josef Albers, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, and choreographer Merce Cunningham, laying a foundation for the storied six-decade career covered in this monograph. She became best known for her abstract looped-wire sculptures, whose organic shapes invite comparisons to nature and the human body, and public art including the Japanese American Internment Memorial (1994) in San Jose.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
Edited by Ainsley M. Cameron and Emily Liebert (Monacelli) $49.95
Sikander, who has lived and worked in the U.S. since 1993, was born in Pakistan and studied with master miniaturist Bashir Ahment at Lahore’s National College of Arts. Her influential undergraduate thesis, The Scroll (1989–1990), imbued the traditional Indo-Persian practice with a modern feminist sensibility that asserted its contemporary relevance while challenging Eurocentric notions of art. Like their classical inspiration, her neo-miniatures, some expanded to mural size, astonish with their precision and use of color and texture.
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real
Tyler Mitchell (Aperture) $65
At age 23, Mitchell became first Black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue, for Beyoncé’s appearance in the September 2018 issue. This early career survey includes editorial work as well as fine art photography and video installation stills in which the artist, now 30, explores themes of family, community, and Black people’s position in history and society. The congenial pastoral setting of his large-scale Riverside Scene (2021), for instance, evokes George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and, as scholar and critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an included essay, “foregrounds Black leisure as both noble and normative.”
Dogs & Cats
Illustrated pets offer charming lessons in everything from the power of positive thinking to the pythagorean theorem.
Dog Affirmations
Andrea Cáceres (Bloomsbury) $17.99
This pup’s-eye view of life begins with a silky terrier (a ringer for the artist’s dog, Tobi) making an assertion in the mirror: “Today is going to be a good day.” An assortment of breeds—bulldog, dachshund, Dalmatian, and more—follow, expressing goals both optimistic (“I’m going to the big dog’s dog park today”) and naughty (“I will roll in something stinky”). A good day, after all, depends on one’s perspective.
Dog Only Knows
Alison Friend (Artisan) $30
Friend’s oil paintings recall the work of the old masters with two key differences: her subjects are canine, and except for the odd direct homage—for instance, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring—the scenes are contemporary, more or less. One cozy pair share a box of takeout pepperoni pizza, while a whippet, deep on concentration, focuses on “Netflix and knitting.” Even in the most fanciful, least realistic depictions (a rescue who “came with a few bad habits”—whiskey drinking and cigarette smoking), the personalities bound off the page.
Dog Show
Billy Collins, illus. by Pamela Sztybel (Random House) $20
Watercolor portraiture by Sztybel accompanies 25 poems by former U.S. poet laureate Collins. In one, a rain-wet dog wanders the pub, “hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears”; in another, a geriatric pet “sniffs some roadside weeds/ as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.” Even the neighborhood nuisance, whose yipping can be heard over the full-blast stereo, is afforded dignity: Collins imagines him “sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven had included a part for barking dog.”
Math Cats
Daniel M. Look, illus. by Johanna Breuch (Running Press) $20
Look, a professor at St. Lawrence University, delivers lessons on the Fibonacci sequence, graph theory, the prisoner’s dilemma, and more, assisted by Breuch’s playful artwork of cats including the author’s own (Conan T. Cat, Meow Meow, SpaghettiOs, and Mrs. Waffles). Feline puns abound: one kitty holds his forelegs to demonstrate a “hypawtenuse,” and a section on angles considers the relationship between Earth, the sun, and the constellation “Purrseus.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats
Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America) $16.95
This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by
the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction (the Earthsea Cycle; The Left Hand of Darkness), who also harbored an affection for cats. The artwork ranges from comedic and cartoonlike to textured and realistic, and the writings are by turns whimsical—“The Art of Bunditsu” is an illustrated work of “Japanese tabbist meditation”—and odic, including tributes to Neko, Leonard, and other Le Guin companions.
Jane Austen
December 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of austen’s birth. One Cannot have too large a party.
Jane Austen in 41 Objects
Kathryn Sutherland (Bodleian Library) $40
An array of items, one for each year the author lived, provide a window
into her life and legacy. The marriage register from St. Nicholas Church
in Steventon, England, where her father was rector, shows evidence of an impish teenage Austen, who inscribed herself three times married to three different (fictional) men. Some two centuries later, an altogether different
relic gets its due: the linen shirt famously worn, sopping wet, by Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen’s Fashion Bible
Ros Ballaster (Macmillan Collector’s Library) $24.99
This delightful tour of Regency-era fashion and its place in Jane Austen’s novels and letters uses selections from La Belle Assemblée, a fashion magazine published from 1806 to 1848 and read by the Austen sisters, to bring alive excerpts from Austen’s writings. Ballaster, an Oxford University professor, covers proper dress for seaside resorts and grand balls, for small-town and city life, and for activities including walking, dancing, and riding. Color plates from the magazine and a glossary of fashion terms round out the scrupulously detailed volume.
Jane Austen’s Garden
Molly Williams, illus. by Jessica Roux (Andrews McMeel) $24.99
Williams examines the cultivation practices of the Regency era and delves into the botanical references that proliferate in Austen’s works: a pineapple hothouse in Northanger Abbey, an apricot tree in Mansfield Park, cabbage beds in Emma. The tour wends through gardens, conservatories, parkland, and beyond, signposted by Roux’s soft-focus illustrations and concluding with a glossary of Regency horticultural language.
The Novel Life of Jane Austen
Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg (Black Dog & Leventhal) $28
Austen scholar Barchas and artist Greenberg refashion the novelist’s biography into a sprightly tale in the mode of one of her comedies of manners. Three sections—“Budding Writer,” “Struggling Artist,” and “Published Author”—cover major events in Austen’s life as well as small, colorful moments. In this real-life version of a Regency romance, the love story is between Jane and her family, particularly her artistic sister Cassandra, who shares Jane’s love of popular literature and encourages her writing.
The Worlds of Jane Austen
Helena Kelly (Frances Lincoln) $35
Each chapter of this guide explores a different part of Austen’s history, from the rectory in Steventon where she was born and her boarding school education to the wars and revolutions that took place in her lifetime alongside photos and period artwork. Kelly traces Austen tropes, like marriage proposals, her characters’ fondness for reading, and references to the rise of abolitionists and radical thinkers, back to the author’s life, and offers a nuanced chronicle of the myriad ways Austen and her work have been interpreted over time.
Nature & Horticulture
Art meets science meets culture meets history in these Striking visual explorations.
Aviary
Danaé Panchaud and William A. Ewing (Thames & Hudson) $65
More than 200 photos by some 50 contributors capture (if only for a moment) birds in their natural habitats and urban environments; in stylized portraiture and fashion photography; solo, interacting with humans, or with each other. In selecting and organizing the images, some in somber tones but most in vivid, hyperrealistic color, the authors set out to highlight “the complexities that define our relationship with birds and, most importantly, capture their most appealing qualities,” Panchaud writes.
Botanical Revolutions
Giovanni Aloi (Getty) $35
Aloi considers how plants shaped art history, whether as canvas, medium, or subject in this globe-trotting, millennia-spanning work. One of many illuminating passages, for instance, traces the appearance of the toothed-leaf acanthus mollis, a popular image in Middle Eastern rugs and arabesques. Beginning in the fifth century BCE with development of the Cornithian column in Greece, the motif traveled across southern Asia, northern India, and beyond, before gracing William Morris’s landmark acanthus wallpaper some two thousand years later.
Butterfly
(Phaidon) $59.95
Juxtaposed images of lepidoptera highlight unexpected connections across time and media: The curling grapevine in Samuel Jaffee’s 2012 photo of a typhon sphinx moth larva echoes the curve of the hookah pipe in John Tenniel’s caterpillar illustration for 1890’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland; a yellow tin butterfly toy, c. 1975, bears a familial resemblance to a winged creature depicted by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in the Florentine Codex, 1577.
Clouds
Edward Graham (Princeton Univ.) $29.95
Atmospheric scientist Graham demystifies the misty puffballs in the sky using an inviting combination of diagrams, scientific tables, and paintings spanning the late 18th through early 20th centuries. Frederic Edwin Church’s High Clouds Across the Hudson (1870) shows two Cumulonimbus calvus cells—Church often did cloud studies in prep for his artwork—while the sizes of the whirls in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) match the pattern known as a “turbulent cascade,” undiscovered until some 50 years later.
The Radiant Sea
Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen (Abrams) $55
The magnificent denizens of the deep blue are on full-spectrum display, categorized by the qualities of transparency, pigmentation, iridescence, bioluminescence, and fluorescence. Presented against black backgrounds, the images on their own inspire awe; accompanying text—“one of the most stunning and perplexing of coral reef animals is the disco clam”—delights.
Offbeat Architecture
geek out on landmark buildings, luxury accommodations, and the most unassuming of structures.
Extraordinary Pools
Naina Gupta (Princeton Architectural Press) $29.95
Gupta, an architect and teacher at University of Sheffield, U.K., dives into 49 public and private pools around the globe, noting their cultural and historical significances alongside their aesthetic merits. In Rome, the muscular murals adorning the Palazzo delle Terme, completed in 1938, echo classical Roman art and Mussolini’s fascist ambitions. London’s 60-meter-long Parliament Hill Fields Lido, among a wave of public pools built in the city from the early 1900s through the 1930s, serves “a spectrum of people with different needs,” Gupta writes, functioning as an “urban seascape.”
The Palm Springs School
Alan Hess (Rizzoli) $65
Examining the various forces that nurtured desert modernism, Hess highlights dozens of key players and standout buildings. Richard Neutra’s work includes the Kaufmann house (1946), commissioned by the couple who’d hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater in Mill Run, Penn. John Lautner, known for pioneering the atomic age Googie style, also designed, among other Palm Springs projects, the Hope house (1979), whose curving tortoise-shell roof typifies organic modernism. The collection of commercial buildings, private homes, and public spaces on display are a feast for midcentury mod fans.
Richard Johnson: Resilience
Lucie Bergeron-Johnson and Tom Smart (Figure 1) $60
This gathers work by Canadian photographer Johnson (1957–2021), who documented ice fishing huts across the Great White North and, in a separate project, the earthen root cellars traditionally used in Newfoundland. A tidy-looking blue and white hut in Québec sports decorative shutters and dormer windows; motifs dominating the walls of different Ontario huts include penguins, a howling wolf silhouette, and a pair of aces. Ice village photos, with their colorful clusters of buildings, highlight the social aspect of fishing, while solitary root cellars blend into the scrubby hills. It’s part Accidentally Wes Anderson, part hobbit-house catalog.
Toilets of the World
(Lonely Planet) $16.99
This visual ode to the commode features settings both modest and magnificent. The gilded throne room decorated by Hungarian artist Akos Juhasz is one of several such relief stations in the Cistern Chapel public toilet block in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. At the Bell pub in Tıcehurst, England, a trio of tubas serve as urinals, while the comparatively serviceable urinals at Thailand’s Samui Airport face a stocked aquarium. Given the subject matter and 7.4" × 7.4" trim size, this coffee-table book seems destined for a different perch.
Vintage Motels
Ellie Seymour (Luster) $45
Travel journalist Seymour documents 40 revived roadside lodges across 19 U.S. states. California accommodations, including renowned kitschfest the Madonna Inn, make up about a third of the entries; elsewhere; Maine’s Nevada Motel is a beachfront property originally built in 1951 by a World War II veteran to resemble the USS Nevada battleship, and Springfield, Mo.’s Rockwood Motor Court began its run in 1929 as a six-cabin tourist camp along Route 66. Vintage style + modern amenities = a reason to break out the road atlas and a pen and get circling.
Pastimes & Pop Culture
A grab bag of titles holds appeal for Gamers, Skaters, Animation fans, and biblio/cinephiles.
The Art of Bob’s Burgers
Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman (Rizzoli Universe) $50
Follow the offbeat, affectionate Belcher family—originally two rather than three kids and, per Bouchard “we also thought maybe the family would be cannibals...[!]”—from early concept art through 15 seasons of set pieces, sight gags, and fantasy sequences, plus the 2022 movie. The animated sitcom, which also spawned a bestselling cookbook featuring real recipes for the show’s jokey burgers-of-the-day, was just renewed for four more seasons.
Good Movies as Old Books
Matt Stevens (Chronicle) $30
Stevens reimagines more than 200 films as midcentury paperbacks, with a few clothbound hardcovers in the mix. The palettes and graphic designs are so spot-on that you’ll swear you’ve seen these books before, and the references come fast and furious: Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, for instance, depicts a surfer in the barrel, styled less as an ocean wave than as a James Bond movie’s gun-barrel opening sequence.
How a Game Lives
Jacob Geller (HarperPop) $36
More than one million subscribers turn to Geller’s YouTube channel for his video essays on gaming and the broader culture. This volume collects 10 of them in prose form, annotated by Geller and enhanced by original work from varied artists, expanding on rather than attempting to replicate the video format. Contributors include National Book Award finalist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Chain Gang All-Stars), who writes in his foreword that Geller has “an uncanny ability to see what art or physical spaces or digital spaces are attempting to do.”
Mahjong
Nicole Wong (Hardie Grant) $25
Wong hosts pop-up game nights in the San Francisco Bay Area and sees mahjong as “a full sensory and social experience.” Her book, illustrated with drawings and photographs of tiles, boards, and game-night snacks, functions as a handbook and as an exploration of the game’s significance to Wong, her family, and the Asian diaspora. Other topics include the materials used to create sets (ancient bone and bamboo; modern Bakelite and acrylic) and the deeper meaning of the climactic mahjong scene in 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians.
The Skateboard Life
Neftalie Williams (Artisan) $40
Sociologist Williams, a professor at San Diego State and director of the university’s Center for Skateboarding, Action Sports, and Social Change, profiles 65 figures in the sport. Tony Hawk (“the GOAT”) is in there, as are Peggy Oki, “monarch of the Z-boys”; Christian “Holmes” Hosoi, Hawk’s “only rival during the 1980s”; and Brianna King, “a beacon to women and queer skaters.” Crisp graphic design, photo portraits, and action shots make their stories pop.
