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Art Essays: A Collection (New American Canon) Paperback – December 15, 2021

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Contributors: Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Claire-Louise Bennett, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, Chris Kraus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Lerner, Orhan Pamuk, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Hanya Yanagihara

• Part of series New American Canon
• Print length 192 pages
• Language English
• Publisher University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date December 15, 2021
• Dimensions 6 x 0.48 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1609388119
• ISBN-13 978-1609388119
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University Of Iowa Press (December 15, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609388119
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609388119
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.48 x 9 inches
• #14,572 in Art History (Books)

About the author

Alexandra kingston-reese.

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University of Iowa Press

Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri. From the art of Sonia Delaunay to contemporary photography, from the docks of Malaysia to Leonora Carrington’s home in Mexico City, and from reflections on modern Black British paintings to meditations on the female gaze, these essays bring together blazing insights to the visual world, with personal, intimate reflections. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.

“As joyous as it is intelligent,  Art Essays  proves once and for all that the best essays enchant us with the same splendor and humor and passion as the best novels or the most striking paintings.”—Merve Emre, University of Oxford

“This brilliantly stimulating book canonizes the art essay as the form of the moment and shows what it makes possible. Boldly claiming that the novel is now a satellite orbiting the essay, it gathers essays by exciting contemporary novelists on art and watches the critical, creative, and formal sparks fly.”—Kathryn Murphy, University of Oxford 

Chloe Aridjis Tash Aw Claire-Louise Bennett Teju Cole Geoff Dyer Sheila Heti Katie Kitamura Chris Kraus Jhumpa Lahiri Ben Lerner Orhan Pamuk Ali Smith Zadie Smith Heidi Sopinka Hanya Yanagihara

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Art Essays: A Collection

Art Essays  is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists.

This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri. From the art of Sonia Delaunay to contemporary photography, from the docks of Malaysia to Leonora Carrington’s home in Mexico City, and from reflections on modern Black British paintings to meditations on the female gaze, these essays bring together blazing insights to the visual world, with personal, intimate reflections.

With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese,  Art Essays  is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.

Contributors:  Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Claire-Louise Bennett, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, Chris Kraus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Lerner, Orhan Pamuk, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Hanya Yanagihara

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Six Books That Will Change How You Look at Art

These titles expand our understanding of creative work—and affirm that it is fundamental to how we process the world.

In 1923, Pablo Picasso told his peer, the Mexican gallery owner Marius de Zayas, that “art is a lie”—but one that “makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Artists intuitively engage—in paint, clay, prints, film—with the strangeness of life. Their creations can differ wildly from our expectations and outlook; they frequently inspire emotion by surprising us or, as Picasso believed, by manipulating our perception.

Those inexplicable feelings make many people curious. Viewers are driven to understand who makes art and why, seeking out behind-the-scenes details about well-loved artworks. Memoirs, manifestos, and aesthetic histories offer insights into what can otherwise be unspoken and untranslatable, including the mystery involved in the making of a piece.

The six titles presented below explore different facets of visual art: the materials, the concepts, the people. Together, they affirm that, as Picasso said a century ago, creative work reveals to us what is hidden; it is fundamental to how we process the world.

Color , by Victoria Finl ay

Many accounts of art history begin with how humans first acquired the materials that create colors. In her book, Finlay unearths the background of familiar hues. The results reveal how political a painter’s palette can be. Ochre, the by-product of clay and ferric oxide, brings Finlay to Australia and its Aboriginal people, who have used it for thousands of years in ceremonial practices. Red has a bloody background: Millions of cochineal beetles have been killed to produce the lucrative pigment carmine, and Spain violently invaded Mexico, where it was traditionally extracted. Most macabre of all is the troubling past of brown. Finlay focuses on “mummy brown,” the shade extracted from crushed Egyptian mummies and allegedly used in Romantic artworks such as Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People . Finlay’s investigation adds depth to our interpretation of the history of art: Colors don’t simply flow out of a tube. Beyond their function and appeal, they carry memories—sometimes violent ones.

Read: To understand art, think biology

The Unknown Masterpiece , by Honoré de Balzac (translated by Richard Howard)

Balzac’s novella, which influenced modernists such as Paul Cézanne and Picasso, is about the sacrifices that artists are willing to make for their art, and whether or not universal beauty exists. In 17th-century Paris, the lives of three painters briefly collide: A young Nicolas Poussin visits the studio of a man he admires, François Porbus. Frenhofer, an old and respected acquaintance of Porbus, is also there. Together, they consider what their profession means and contemplate techniques. Frenhofer shares his struggle to create the perfect painting. His goal is to make the art itself disappear—to feel as if “the air is so real you can no longer distinguish it from the air around yourselves.” But when Frenhofer eventually displays his masterpiece, Balzac exposes the gap between a creator’s hopes and an audience’s reception. Most strikingly, the scene challenges the assumptions that all art should be made for public consumption and that a work is ever finished. An artist may work their entire life just to accept that perfection is an illusion.

The Hearing Trumpet , by Leonora Carrington

Carrington, a significant figure of the 1930s surrealist-art movement in Mexico, explored dreamlike landscapes, uncanny creatures, and bizarre encounters in her paintings, pushing against the “reign of logic” that the French writer André Breton criticized in his influential 1924 Surrealist Manifesto . In her novel, events are similarly illogical—a murder, the legacy of a medieval abbess, and various occult quests add up to a self-affirming exploration of madness and fragile sanity. Carrington’s protagonist, Marian Leatherby, a 92-year-old foreigner living in Mexico, is unexpectedly gifted an ear trumpet by her good friend Carmella. While using the accessory, she overhears that her family wants to send her away to a private institution for seniors; she’s moved to this unfamiliar, cultish space and must adapt to all-new daily rituals. Meanwhile, the hearing trumpet becomes an extension of Leatherby’s intuition, leading her into a fantastical world of myths and magic. The novel is especially notable for offering its audience a way to reappraise Carrington’s other works. As in her canvases, nothing makes sense at first, until a closer inspection shows how irrationality—in all kinds of creative work—is an expression of boundless possibility.

Read: A new way to see art

Ninth Street Women , by Mary Gabriel

Through riveting and braided profiles of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Gabriel illustrates in this groundbreaking group biography how New York City supplanted Paris as the modern art capital of the world in the 1940s and ’50s. In doing so, Gabriel canonizes the women of abstract expressionism, one of the most significant visual movements of mid-century America. Its (mostly male) practitioners came from a generation that was marked by the Great Depression and war, and the style they chose was a form of resistance and rebirth. For “AbEx” women, painting was additionally about living life differently while rejecting misogynistic ideals and pressures. Readers will empathize with their struggle to exist as talented artists, especially when their abusive relationships restrained their full creative potential. Gabriel’s portrait of a few blocks around Washington Square Park, a “critically important stretch of pavement,” recontextualizes these women’s formidable vision and reaffirms that their legacy remains central to contemporary art.

Art Is Life , by Jerry Saltz

Art literally changed Saltz’s life: Once a self-described “failed artist” turned truck driver, he made his passion into a career as an influential critic at The Village Voice and New York Magazine . The author shares that ardor with his readers through a selection of wide-ranging writing from the past 20 years. He looks at the various crises and New York City’s art scene—the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic—and depicts an ebullient yet fragile world undergoing perpetual reinvention. He writes formidable portraits of people such as Beauford Delaney and describes the jaw-dropping splendor of Paleolithic cave paintings in Niaux, France. He worships artwork while denouncing the excesses of its business, taking pleasure in ridiculing the frequently obscene industry’s theatrical auctions and overinflated cycle of openings, biennials, and fairs. But animating this lucrative, commercial global machine, Saltz underscores, is the pricelessness of the artist’s vision—without which life would be quite dull.

Read: Does ‘American art’ exist anymore?

1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows , by Ai Wei wei (translated by Allan H. Barr)

Ai’s long-awaited memoir is a love letter to his poet father, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Lao, as well as a guide to what motivates protest art. Ai revisits, in words and personal illustrations, his alienating childhood, his coming-of-age as a citizen-artist, and his eventual decision to flee China. He recounts how his father, once courted by Communist cadres (and by Mao personally), was disgraced, and how his repudiation by the authorities extended to his entire family: Ai spent significant time in harsh labor camps and reeducation facilities during the Cultural Revolution. From there, the book largely follows the course of China’s contemporary history, which underscores the indivisibility of Ai’s politics and his art. The narrative is briefly interrupted by his stay in the United States in the 1980s, where he lived in precarious conditions doing odd jobs, including sketching people’s portraits in the streets of New York City, before returning to China shortly after the Tiananmen massacre. Then Ai’s dissidence against state-sanctioned abuse ignited more harassment and detention; he now lives in exile with his family. Ai’s pioneering use of blogging and viral reach demonstrate new ways for art to exist in the digital age. His book illustrates the power of shocking, satirical, and insolent work as an instrument to resist oppression and authoritarianism.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Essays on art and science.

Eric R. Kandel

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: March 2024

ISBN: 9780231212564

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $26.95 £22.00

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ISBN: 9780231559454

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List Price: $25.99 £22.00

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Anything Eric R. Kandel says about neuroscience or the relationship between art and neuroscience is noteworthy. He is not only brilliant at explaining difficult and complex scientific ideas and data in simple language but also well-informed about—and sympathetic to—twentieth-century art, and avails himself of an impressive range of art-historical literature. Nancy Princenthal, author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s, and Joseph E. LeDoux, Henry And Lucy Moses Professor of Science, New York University

A lively, erudite inquiry into the experience of art. Kirkus Reviews

Eric R. Kandel’s ‘Essays on Art and Science’ is a fascinating, thought-provoking read that beautifully articulates the complex interplay between our brain’s inner workings and our emotional responses to art. It’s a testament to Kandel’s expertise and ability to make science approachable and relevant to our everyday experiences with art. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the profound ways in which art and science intersect to define our perception of the world. Mental Health Affairs

• Read an excerpt in Book Post
• Read an excerpt "The Creative Brain" from as published in The Transmitter

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• Neuroscience and Biopsychology
• Neuropsychology
• Fine Arts and Art History

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11 Essential Art History Books for Putting It All into Perspective

By The ARTnews Recommends Editors

The ARTnews Recommends Editors

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, ARTNews may receive an affiliate commission.

1. Penelope J.E. Davies, et al., Janson’s History of Art (9th edition)

For more than 60 years, Horst Woldemar Janson’s doorstop of a book served as the go-to text for Art History 101 courses everywhere, promising a sweeping overview of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the dawn of civilization to the present. For the most part, it delivered—except for one titanic omission: women artists. Janson didn’t believe there were any worthy of serious consideration, a prejudice consistent with the book’s Mad Men-era origin, and one the author maintained until his death, in 1982. However, a 2006 revision basically wrote Janson out of his own book, though his name remained in the title. Works cited as masterpieces (like James McNeill Whistler’s 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 , otherwise known as Whistler’s Mother ) were elided, while previously ignored disciplines (photography and decorative art) were added—as were, finally, female artists. Moreover, it replaced Janson’s focus on the male artist as genius with a more comprehensive reading that takes race, class, and gender into account. Though this most recent edition, published in 2013, is now out of date regarding the newest developments in Western art, it remains extremely useful. The price for a new copy is an eye-popping $250, but used copies are available for far less.

2. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, et al., Art Since 1900 (3rd Edition, two volumes)

Compiled by contributors associated with October , the art-critical quarterly known for its dense and difficult writing, Art Since 1900 was published in 2005 as a corrective to standard art histories while being aimed at a broader readership. Now published as a two-volume set, the book retains October ’s thorny attitude and poststructuralist bent—which is to say, it is skeptical of the notion that art embodies individual expressions that transcend time. Accordingly, the book doesn’t follow the development of what it calls modernism, anti-modernism, and post-modernism through artists or movements. Rather, it treats 20th-century art to a textual deconstruction with short essays tied to certain cultural or historical events for each year between 1900 and 2003, kicking off with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and ending with the 50th Venice Biennale. Your mileage may vary, depending on just how significant you feel these events are in terms of art history, but Art Since 1900 exemplifies the nonhierarchical nature of the discourse that’s prevalent today.

3. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists

Giorgio Vasari’s biographies of the Italian Renaissance’s key players introduced the concept of art history as we know it. Many of his subjects were his near contemporaries (he lived from 1511 to 1574), making the text a primary source for studying the epochal era that ushered in the Western tradition in art (itself bound until recently to the narrative genre Vasari invented). Originally published in 1550, Lives covers the period bracketed by Cimabue (1240–1302) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) and is prefaced with a general treatise on architecture, sculpture, and painting. Later historians would fault Vasari for being too focused on artists from Florence and Rome, though the book was enlarged in 1568 to include members of the School of Venice like Titian. But while Lives didn’t look beyond Italy, its influence spread rapidly in Europe, with the first of its many translations appearing in the Dutch Republic in 1604.

4. Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classical Art: From Greece to Rome  

Although the second half of its title suggests a survey that begins with Ancient Greece, this book is really more about the latter civilization. It proposes that without the Roman Empire, classical art would not have lasted to spark the Renaissance. The authors argue that Rome’s transmission of Greek aesthetics laid the foundations for Western art, and they further contend that the Romans didn’t imitate Greek art but rather reinterpreted and reinvented it. The book’s five chapters cover painting, sculpture, portraiture, and monuments, noting the role of lust—for power, posterity, and sex—in their pursuit. Side trips to archaeological sites like Pompeii explore how new finds maintain our fascination with objects from antiquity while noting that their survival is ultimately a matter of chance.

5. H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art  

At more than 650 pages, H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art appears daunting, but ever since its appearance in 1968, it has served as the essential account of 20th-century art. The book begins with Paris during the 19th century, when notions like art for art’s sake and artists such as Manet, Monet, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Cezanne fired the first shots of modernism. It continues by recounting the major movements—Cubism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art—that impacted the past 100 years of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Using generous illustrations and approachable language, the book tells the story of a revolutionary era that transformed our thinking about the world and art’s place in it. Now in its seventh edition, History of Modern Art has been repeatedly updated to include the latest artistic developments as the 20th century gives way to the 21st.

6. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art

At the beginning of this book (which also appears among Art in America ’s staff picks of essential reading), author E.H. Gombrich observes, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” That statement sets the tone of what has become one of art history’s most popular tomes. Abjuring sweeping discussions of movements or concepts, Gombrich focuses on individual works of art and the figures behind them. Except for a few diversions into ancient and tribal art, this invariably means male painters from the West. Still, Gombrich takes a remarkable stance for an art historian by maintaining that art history can obscure, as well as elucidate, the experience of art by relaying information extraneous to the act of seeing. Linking artists as diverse as Raphael and Cezanne across time, Gombrich insists that they all faced similar challenges to making their work, and that in the final analysis, the artist’s intentions are all that matter.

7. The editors of Phaidon, The Art Book

Smart and lavishly produced, Phaidon’s A-to-Z directory of artists throughout history is the one coffee table accessory you should have in your library. Ranging from the Middle Ages to today, the book features 500 artists, and while some are better known than others, each is given the same luxuriant treatment: a nearly full-page, full-color reproduction of a key work printed with razor-sharp attention to detail. Each entry is accompanied by a brief text with a career overview of the respective artist written in clear, easy-to-follow language. Anywhere you open this volume you’ll find breathtaking images, and since the artists are presented alphabetically, you’ll encounter unexpected juxtapositions of styles and eras across each spread, like one pairing 17th-century Dutch painter Hendrick ter Brugghen and contemporary French conceptualist Daniel Buren. Though The Art Book leans heavily toward painting, it also covers sculpture, photography, video, and installation art.

8. Richard Shone and Jean-Paul Stonard, eds., The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss  

While an art history book about art history books is definitely meta, this compilation of essays covering the category’s 20th-century milestones is a reminder of just how closely developments in art are tied to changes in its study. Gathering a wide-ranging group of leading scholars and curators, The Books that Shaped Art History examines 12 tomes that introduced key critical concepts to the field, starting with Religious Art in 13th-Century France , written by Émile Mâle in 1898. One of the first studies of medieval art, Mâle’s book was also one of the first to use iconography to unlock the meaning of images. Another book, Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History , from 1915, formulated the now common method of comparing artworks on the basis of style. The Books that Shaped Art History takes an admittedly deep dive into its subject, but it is nonetheless a fascinating look at how writing has shaped art and vice versa.

9. Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art  

Sharon F. Patton’s 1998 survey connects African-American art to the Black experience between the early 18th and late 20th centuries. Patton begins with slavery, touching on plantation architecture and the African influences informing the housing enslaved people built for themselves in the southern states. Moving on to folk and decorative arts of the 19th century, Patton considers the impact of large events—such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration—on art made by African-Americans. Finally, the author explores how African-American aesthetics were formed during the 20th century by the likes of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, Black Nationalism in the 1960s and ’70s, and the identity politics of the 1990s.

10. Charles Townsend Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000 , (2nd edition)

As the title notes, this book examines 20th-century art’s unique reliance on theory. In the period predating what’s known as modern art, aesthetic debates focused mainly on technique; during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example, the French Academy was roiled by arguments between two groups—the Poussinistes, named for the 17th-century neoclassicist Nicholas Poussin, and the Rubenistes, named for Poussin’s older contemporary Peter Paul Rubens—over which was more important to painting, line or color. Modernism, however, formulated an entire philosophy for radically transforming art, propelling the movement, as Charles Harrison and Paul Wood write, from “the margins of public notice to the center of the cultural economy.” Harrison and Wood incisively capture this revolution from Post-Impressionism to Postmodernism.

11. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society , (6th edition)

For centuries, art historians overlooked female artists, and the few who managed to gain recognition did so only because it was assumed that they had somehow overcome the limitations of their sex. According to this belief, women couldn’t become artists on their own merit because their gender made it impossible to do so. This bias began to fade during the final decades of the last century as the achievements of women artists became too visible to ignore, most conspicuously in contemporary art. Overlooked names from the past were being reappraised, and this study from 1996 brings to light many such artists from the Middle Ages onward. More important, the book illuminates their struggles against misogyny of their respective times and how they persisted, nevertheless, in pursuing their work.

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Make Your Own List

The Best Art Books of 2023

Recommended by francesca ramsay.

Pinch Me: Trying to Feel Real in the 21st Century by Francesca Ramsay

From the latest research on what art does to the brain to how women in Renaissance times used cosmetics, this year saw a range of accessible and authoritative books about art. Art historian Francesca Ramsay recommends her best art books of 2023—and argues that for all the doom and gloom, it's an exciting time to be an artist.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Ivy Ross & Susan Magsamen

How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity by Jill Burke

Bring No Clothes : Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion by Charlie Porter

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin

Talk Art The Interviews: Conversations on art, life and everything by Robert Diament & Russell Tovey

1 Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Ivy Ross & Susan Magsamen

2 how to be a renaissance woman: the untold history of beauty & female creativity by jill burke, 3 bring no clothes : bloomsbury and the philosophy of fashion by charlie porter, 4 art monsters: unruly bodies in feminist art by lauren elkin, 5 talk art the interviews: conversations on art, life and everything by robert diament & russell tovey.

B efore we launch into the best art books of 2023 that you selected, tell me about your book  Pinch Me . What prompted you to write this book, here and now? 

It was a painting that prompted me, a modest work by Picasso , a still life with a jug and apples, in Paris. I was so struck by it, experiencing a kind of full-body presence. And it was especially surprising because it’s a very unassuming painting. I wasn’t expecting it to have this effect on me. That got me questioning why it would affect me in that way. What was going on in my brain? How could I get this feeling back?

This encounter actually took place quite a long time before I wrote the book. It stayed with me though, and then, of course, lockdown happened. Our lives became very unphysical, very screen based. We weren’t touching each other, we weren’t having these bodily experiences. In fact, we were living kind of outside of our bodies. I’m sure I’m not the only one who found myself becoming more and more disconnected, more dissociated from what was going on in the world. With the fear of death and the pandemic as a backdrop, I wasn’t feeling as present as I had been in the past.

You asked yourself about what goes on in the brain when you’re confronted by a painting that moves you. That’s a nice segue to the first on your list of best art books 2023, Your Brain on Art . Talk to us about this one.

This is a book on neuro-aesthetics, a search into what art literally does to the brain and how creativity can improve one’s mental health. Art can actually alter your neural pathways. GCSE science was as far as I got, so I’m definitely not a scientist myself. Nonetheless, I’ve had these really quite intense reactions to artworks for most of my life, and discovering a scientific backing behind my subjective, aesthetic experiences has been really fascinating. It’s a revelation to me that looking at art lights up the same neural pathways as if you’re falling in love, or if you’re touching a loved one. Looking at something beautiful has a very distinct physiological effect in the brain, very much on an objective level. It’s not just me being a whimsical art historian and calling everything beautiful!

We need creativity and beauty, on the scientific evidence, to lead a good life. There used to be no hard distinction between science and the arts. By insisting on a split between the two we’ve lost so much. Hopefully, and with the help of books like this, now we’re kind of going back to earlier, more holistic understanding, reconnecting and realising that our brains don’t see ‘aesthetic’ or ‘scientific’ experiences as necessarily different. On the contrary, we need this connection.

We’ve spoken previously at Five Books about drawing as thought . This book reminded me that the act of making something is a form of thinking, and a very engaged way of observing the world around us. Making art is a form of mental engagement with our surroundings. 

We also spoke recently on Five Books about Renaissance self-fashioning . You’ve chosen a book by Jill Burke that looks at how this applied to renaissance women. Let’s talk about the second of your best art books 2023. 

I specialise in Renaissance art, very specifically, in Renaissance drawings of the nude. What I find so intriguing about the Renaissance is that there were these pockets of power and influence for women, even in what was a highly patriarchal society. I’d never considered that makeup and beauty would have been a way of showing your power and sharing your individuality.

“Art can actually alter your neural pathways”

Jill Burke, an exceptional Renaissance scholar, brings an incredibly important insight to this under-researched topic. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of serious or high-minded academic history book. On the contrary, it’s written in a way that is really accessible and really entertaining, not to mention completely relevant to art history today.

As we’re talking about appearance and public image, that brings to mind Charlie Porter’s latest book,  Bring No Clothes , another one of your picks for best art books 2023. 

All of the books I’ve selected showcase different forms of creativity. They show the many ways in which we display to others who we are and how we experience the world. This can even be through different things like makeup, as we saw with the example of Renaissance women, or as Charlie Porter writes, through clothes. He focuses on the early 20th century Bloomsbury group of artists, six literary and artistic figures, and uses their example to open up a discussion about dress. What we wear is so linked to our creativity and how we’re getting ourselves across to others. The members of Bloomsbury were all artists, but they were showcasing their art also in the way they dressed, which was an important way of marking out who they were, and who they wanted to be in society.

I love the linkage between what artists create as their ‘product’, and how they present themselves to the public eye, which is an equally creative act. We featured  What Artists Wear  by Charlie Porter in our Best Art Books of 2022.

A very different form of creativity, perhaps, is monstrosity, the way that Laura Elkin describes it in her book,  Art Monsters . What made this book stand out as one of the best art books 2023? 

In exactly the same way as clothes, this is a book about using something unexpected as the artistic medium. In this case, it deals with artists using the body. The female body, specifically. I’m writing a lecture about the nude at the moment, so questions of the body are very much on my mind. The nude was re-appropriated from the late 19th and into the 20th century from the confines of historic representation.

Laura Elkin looks to a number of truly incredible women artists, highlighting a further evolution of ideas of the body. Many of them are performance artists, but what unifies all of them is a heritage of anti-patriarchy, using the female form to assert these ideas. It’s a really powerful, angry text. These artists put themselves inside the canvas, which in this case is the female form. It’s somewhat whimsical but also remarkable to remember that we’re walking around inside an artistic canvas!

What struck me about this and your other selections is how much they revolve around embodiment. 

Absolutely. This book highlights the disconnection between the naked and the nude. A lot of these artists aren’t depicting themselves as nude, that is, as this rather idealised image of what the objective body should be. What they are showcasing is the physical experience of what it is to be inside a body, what it is to have a woman’s body, or whatever body in fact.

“Nakedness is a form of dress”, wrote John Berger . 

Let’s talk about the final book in your selection, Talk Art . 

This book is based on a fantastic podcast by Russell Taylor and Robert Diament. I got into it quite a few years ago, when it first started. It somehow hadn’t occurred to me until then as a Renaissance art historian that, well, all the artists I learned about are dead! There’s only so much that you can know about them, only so much they can tell us. For the art historian in me, this podcast and this book have been a real breath of fresh air, hearing directly from artists who are not being put on a pedestal, but behaving like makers, like real people, real practical living individuals.

The whole creative process is endlessly fascinating. Reading  Your Brain on Art and learning about neurological states has been a great privilege because it’s given me a whole new way of understanding human making and human creativity. And in this book we can hear directly from creatives about that process. The interviews encompass established names like Grayson Perry or Tracy Emin, as well as new names. It’s not just visual artists, it also extends to other art forms, and includes conversations with the likes of Elton John, Paul Smith and Stephen Fry . All kinds of people making all kinds of art. In the end, it’s a glorification of simply being alive.

The podcast and the books emerging from it are almost like an encyclopaedia of contemporary voices in art. I think that’s why they’ve been so successful. The way they write and talk about art is not elitist, either. In spite of all of the disasters going on in the world, we live in a really exciting, creative time. It’s a world where we’re not blocked in by having to create religious art, for example, or art that’s not about sex, or whatever. People can be creating in whatever way they want. That’s a very significant element of positivity in our often dark times.

December 19, 2023

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

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Francesca Ramsay

Francesca Ramsay is an art historian and writer based in Bristol. She specialised in Renaissance drawings of the nude, but loves works on paper of all periods. PINCH ME: Trying to Feel Real in the 21 st Century  is her first book. She is tentatively beginning her next.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

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April guide to the arts at the U

By Brittney Bomnin Garcia [email protected] 03-29-2024

Explore a roundup of events this month, including concerts, exhibitions, and undergraduate student presentations during the annual Research, Creativity, and Innovation Forum. Learn more about The U Creates —the University’s digital hub for the arts, culture, and creative expression—and view the full calendar of events .

VIEW ALL: Bill Cosford Cinema | Center for the Humanities | Jerry Herman Ring Theatre | Frost School of Music | Lowe Art Museum | School of Architecture | University Libraries | UM Art Galleries

Saturday, April 6, 7:30 p.m. | in person and streaming, purchase tickets

Frost Music Live!: Schubertiade for Violin and Piano

Frost School of Music’s piano professors will join renowned violinist Charles Castleman to unveil the magic of Franz Schubert. A tradition that began in 1815 honoring the then 18-year-old Schubert, the Schubertiade originated as an unpublicized, informal concert of his music, but quickly spread throughout Europe, and eventually to the United States. Purchase tickets .

Newman Recital Hall, Knight Center for Music Innovation, 5513 San Amaro Dr, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Monday, April 8, 6:30 p.m. | in person, free event

Book Talk: ‘Roman Satire’

With particular attention to authorial and national identity, artistic self-definition, and literary reception, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, professor of classics and senior associate dean for faculty affairs and college diversity at the College of Arts and Sciences, shows how four ancient Latin poets—Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal—asked and answered these questions between the second century BCE and the second century CE as they invented and reinvented the genre of Roman verse Satire. Save your seat .

Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables, FL 33134

Tuesday, April 9, noon | virtual, free event

Slow Looking with the Lowe: Highlights from the Campus Art Collection

During this virtual program, Tola Porter, Lowe Art Museum educator for academic and public programs, will lead participants through a 30-minute mindful and interactive session exploring selected artworks from the Lowe’s collection. Sign up now .

Lowe Art Museum, 1301 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Wednesday, Apr. 10, noon to 4 p.m. | in person, free event

Research, Creativity, and Innovation Forum (RCIF)

The Office of Undergraduate Research and Community Outreach offers students from all disciplines the opportunity to present their research to a wide audience consisting of their peers, faculty and staff members, and the larger University community. In collaboration with the Center for the Humanities, RCIF has added a panel presentation component this year for students and peers to develop their presentation skills and further engage with their research in the humanities. Learn more .

Donna E. Shalala Student Center, 1330 Miller Drive, Miami, FL 33146

Thursday, April 11, 4 p.m. | in person, free event

Edith Bleich Lecture Series: Jennifer V. Evans, professor of history at Carleton University in Canada

In her lecture, “Why We Need Queer Kinship Now More Than Ever,” Evans asks how the queer and trans past has often been drawn upon to make a series of claims about liberal democracy itself, including the place of identity in rights-based discourses of experience, policy, and governance. Register now .

Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room, 1300 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Thursday and Friday, April 11–12 | in person, purchase tickets

Smart Cities MIAMI 2024

The School of Architecture, in collaboration with the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, will host the 8th Annual Smart Cities Conference . This event will explore the theme of artificial intelligence in design, offering a platform to delve into the cutting-edge advancements shaping the future of architecture. Registration is $50 per person.

Lakeside Village Expo Center, 1280 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Saturday, April 13, 6 p.m. | in person, free event

M.F.A. in Creative Writing thesis reading

Graduate students Guillermo Leon, Dorie Spangler, and Swetha Siva, who are pursuing Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, will share their thesis. This event is open to the public.

Thursday April 17, 6 p.m. | in person, free event

Lowe Connects: Exploring Art, Marine Biology, and Engineering to Address Climate Challenges

U-Link partners from the departments of art and art history, marine biology, and engineering will speak about the connection between scientific research, engineering, and art. Guests will learn about the ways that the University of Miami is catalyzing interdisciplinary collaboration to advance knowledge on the impacts of climate change and other stressors, and the development of practical solutions to meet society’s changing needs. Register now .

Mindfulness programs are offered virtually at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays and in person at 10:30 a.m. on Thursdays at the Otto G. Richter Library.

Friday and Saturday, April 19-20 and Friday and Saturday, April 26-27 | in person, purchase tickets

‘Urinetown, the Musical’

Join the revolt in a dystopian future where water is worth its weight in gold, and one of the most basic human needs is under the control of an evil bureaucracy. Wickedly witty, this Tony Award- winning musical satire pokes fun at politics, social irresponsibility, capitalism, and musical theater itself. University students and staff and faculty members can use code THSUTOWN before selecting their seats to receive a discount. University students can obtain free entry to an 8 p.m. show Thursday, April 25, by presenting a valid ’Cane ID. Purchase tickets .

Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, 1312 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Saturday, April 20, 6 p.m. | in person, free event

Catherine Kramer: ‘Known/Unknown’

On view from April 5 through April 26, the University community is invited to the opening reception of “Known/Unknown,” an exhibition by Master of Fine Arts candidate Catherine Kramer. Drawing inspiration from Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung and his process of active imagination, Kramer intentionally works with subconsciously produced imagery while creating her artwork. Learn more .

University of Miami Wynwood Gallery, 2750 NW Third Ave., Suite 4, Miami, FL 33127

On view now through Saturday, April 20 | in person

The Annual Juried Exhibition

Organized by the Department of Art and Art History and hosted by the Lowe Art Museum, the exhibition features works of art across various media created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Miami. Learn more .

Monday, April 22, 4 p.m. | in person and streaming, free event

Adobe Scholars Reception

Meet and engage with the 2023-2024 Adobe Scholars as they share the results of their projects. This event is free to attend and open to the public. The online component of this hybrid event will be hosted using Zoom software. Sign up to participate .

Monday, April 22, 7:30 p.m. | in person, free event

‘Sing Sing’

Attend a sneak preview of “Sing Sing,” the story of an inmate at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY, who forms a theater troupe with his fellow prisoners. Admission is free. Registration is required .

Bill Cosford Cinema, Dooly Memorial 225, 5030 Brunson Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Thursday April 25, 6 p.m. | in person, free event

ArtLab | Miya Ando: Sky Writing lecture and reception

Join the Lowe for a talk and reception featuring artist Miya Ando to celebrate the ArtLab 2024 exhibition, Miya Ando: Sky Writing, on view through Saturday, June 1. This student-curated exhibition features multimedia works by Miya Ando, whose oeuvre explores nature’s ever-changing moods and the fragility of human existence. Register to attend .

Thursday, April 25, 7:30 p.m. | in person and streaming, purchase tickets

Frost Music Live!: Michel Camilo and the Frost Latin Jazz Orchestra

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, Michel Camilo bridges the genres of jazz, classical, popular and world music with his artistry and virtuosity. The Grammy, Latin Grammy, and Emmy Award-winner joins forces for one night only with the Frost Latin Jazz Orchestra and Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto. Purchase tickets .

Maurice Gusman Concert Hall, Frost School of Music, 1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Saturday, April 27, 7:30 p.m. | in person and streaming, purchase tickets

Frost Music Live!: Beethoven’s 9th

The Frost Symphony Orchestra season finale presents a symphonic masterwork alongside four American orchestral miniatures by Augusta Reed Thomas, Bernard Rands, Daren Hagan, and Chen Yi. Purchase tickets .

Featured: RCIF Humanities Hub

As part of the Research, Creativity, and Innovation Forum, the Humanities Hub will feature representatives from the University's humanities departments to provide attendees with information about the humanities as well as answers to specific questions about fields of study, research pursuits, and career opportunities. The Humanities Hub aims to create a stronger connection between research and the humanities within the undergraduate student body and also promotes the different ways in which students can get involved in the humanities.

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Author Interviews

Don winslow ends trilogy, and his writing career, with final novel 'city in ruins'.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks to best-selling suspense author Don Winslow about what he says is his final novel, "City in Ruins."

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Danny Ryan, who's been a Rhode Island mobster, dockworker and fugitive from the law, is now a pillar of the community in Las Vegas. He's got a palatial home to which good citizens come to pay homage and enjoy his hospitality, his young son he loves and the companionship - well, three times a week, anyway - of an accomplished and compelling woman he respects. What could possibly go wrong? "City In Ruins" is the third and final novel in the bestselling Danny Ryan trilogy by Don Winslow. It follows "City On Fire" and "City Of Dreams," and Don Winslow says quite explicitly, "City Of Ruins" is my final book - no loopholes I could detect. He joins us now from Julian, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us.

DON WINSLOW: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

SIMON: The book opens with an implosion, a famous old Las Vegas hotel, now owned by Danny Ryan, being brought down from the inside. Is implosion a kind of theme for Danny Ryan's life, too?

WINSLOW: Yeah, it sure is. Looking over the arc of these three books, I think we're looking at a certain kind of self-destruction with dynamite, if you will, or explosives that were laid many years earlier on a long fuse, to torture the metaphor, and so implosion's definitely a theme.

SIMON: In earlier books, Danny had used what I'll just refer to as ill-gotten gains from a criminal enterprise to buy his way into a respectable hotel and gaming enterprise. He's got a dream. In fact, a hotel - I guess it's called the Dream in Italian.

WINSLOW: It is. Yeah, Il Sogno.

SIMON: Tell us about this place he wants to bring into being.

WINSLOW: Well, he wants to bring into being a new kind of megahotel where people walk in and it's literally a dream with images shifting constantly on the walls of beauty and action and all kinds of things. And I think it's reflective of his own dream of trying to create a new kind of life for himself and for his son.

SIMON: What stands in the way?

WINSLOW: Well, a number of things. For one thing, this valuable piece of real estate that this old hotel sat on is critical to power on the Las Vegas Strip. And he basically undermines a rival in order to acquire it. And then it turns out that both Danny and this rival have mob ties from the past that each of them is trying to escape and trying to leave behind him, and neither one of them can. And so those things really get in the way of Danny's dream.

SIMON: You've written so many other books over the years, including "Savages," "The Force," "The Cartel," bestsellers made into screen properties. What's kept you coming back to Danny Ryan?

WINSLOW: You know, it took me almost 30 years to complete this trilogy. You know, it's funny. You look back on your life. When I started the Danny Ryan books, my now-adult and married son was a toddler. What I was - set out to do was to write a fully contemporary crime epic that took its stories and characters, however, from the Greek and Roman classics, principally the Aeneid, but also the Odyssey and the Iliad and certain Greek tragic dramas. I kept failing at it. I would write some of the book, and some of it worked, and a lot of it didn't. And so at times, I was discouraged, thinking that either, A, it was a bad idea, or, B, it was a good idea and I didn't have the chops to carry it out. But I kept coming back to it 'cause I couldn't leave it behind. And then later on, a couple of decades down the road - you know, I live mostly in California - I started to go back to Rhode Island, where a lot of the first book is set, and I fell in love with the place again, and I felt that I could write it, perhaps in a better and more mature way than I could have done 20 years earlier.

SIMON: Did you feel a kinship with Danny?

WINSLOW: I think so. You know, I grew up with a lot of Danny'. I played pond hockey with them. I went to the beaches with them, you know, to the bars and restaurants and all kinds of things. So it's funny how little self-awareness you can have. The second volume of this book, "City Of Dreams," is basically Danny wandering the country trying to find a place to set his feet. I was deep into writing the third book before I looked back on the second book and realized how connected I was to Danny in that regard. You know, I left Rhode Island when I was 17 and spent decades wandering not only the country but the world, doing various kinds of jobs trying to make a living, trying without a notable degree of success to become a writer and finally kind of made that happen and found a place, if you will, to set my feet.

SIMON: You mentioned all the jobs you had. You were a private eye in Times Square.

WINSLOW: Yes, sir.

SIMON: Is that as exciting as it sounds, or is it a lot of keyhole peeping?

WINSLOW: (Laughter) Not too much keyhole peeping, thank God. You know, I didn't do what they call matrimonial work. But, no, it was not romantic at all. I was basically what is known as a street rat. And so I started that by investigating embezzlement and thefts in cinemas and legit movie theaters on Times Square - there were a few in those days - and then graduated, if you want to call it that, to being a troll. I would walk around Times Square trying to get mugged, and there were big tough guys, which I am not, behind me jumping in like riders at the rodeo and then eventually chasing runaways and trying to get to them before the pimps did.

SIMON: By the way, not that I'm interested in doing this, how do you arrange to get mugged?

WINSLOW: (Laughter) Well, for one thing, you arrange to be 5'6 and 130 pounds. That helps. And then you walk around looking like you don't know where you're going, like you're a tourist, with a wallet prominently in your back pants pocket.

SIMON: Wow. Sounds like it was indispensable to your literature.

WINSLOW: In some ways. You know, I mean, I think that being a PI, and then later I did it out in California, out here, on a much higher kind of level. But it got me in that world. I got to know cops and crooks and street people and lawyers and judges and courtrooms and all of that. But I think the most important influence it had on my work was in terms of investigation itself. I learned how to do research. I learned how to interview people. And the same skills that I would have used as an investigator are the skills that I brought to researching the novels.

SIMON: All of this steers us to asking about your goodbye. The acknowledgments you write include hundreds of people, parents...

WINSLOW: Yes.

SIMON: ...readers, old teachers...

WINSLOW: Sure.

SIMON: ...Even your agent.

WINSLOW: Especially my agent. Yeah.

SIMON: And as you say, goodbyes are hard. So why are you retiring?

WINSLOW: It's the confluence of two streams, if you will. One is that having finished this trilogy felt like an ending to me. It felt like, yeah, kind of my life's work. The second, though, major stream, and probably more important one, is that I just think that we're at a time in this country of crisis and a time where democracy is under a severe threat. And I think that the response to that needs to be more immediate than one can do in a novel, you know? You know, I'm not young. I'm 70. And I think whatever energies and time I have are better spent in that fight.

SIMON: Don Winslow, his new and insists his last novel, "City In Ruins." Thanks so much for being with us, and thanks for everything.

WINSLOW: Thank you very much. That's gracious of you to say.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CASCADE")

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Julia Alvarez wrote her new novel as if it were her last

‘the cemetery of untold stories,’ written as alvarez was going through a health crisis, grapples with the prospect of work left unfinished.

Julia Alvarez, 74, has been thinking a lot about what it means to be an elder. In her latest novel, “ The Cemetery of Untold Stories ,” the central character — a celebrated Dominican American author, like her creator — regards her literary reputation with skepticism: “The glow of celebrity now tinged with nostalgia might keep the fan fires going, but Alma didn’t want anyone’s condescension or pity. The time had come to stop beating herself up for not being able to finish anything. She was trying to hold on to the literary version of good looks, the plastic surgeries of astute agents and editors nipping and tucking the flagging work.”

Like “ How the García Girls Lost Their Accents ,” Alvarez’s pathbreaking novel from 1991, her new book explores sisterhood, immigration and return, and family secrets. But it also charts new, at times surreal, territory for Alvarez. Alma, unwilling to simply coast on readers’ nostalgia, resolves to build a little house on some inherited land in the Dominican Republic, where she literally buries her unfinished work. But the characters of these abandoned projects have their own ideas: They whisper their stories to Filomena, a local woman hired as the cemetery’s caretaker, and to Filomena’s nephew Pepito, an aspiring academic.

I spoke to Alvarez over video in late March. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What were the first seeds of this novel?

As I get older, I’m more and more interested in the landscape of aging. What does this experience — the end of your life, latter life — feel like? More specifically, what is it like for someone who has spent a lifetime in a craft? I didn’t have answers. I was just curious. My last novel, “ Afterlife ,” came out during the pandemic, in 2020. There was a sense of mortality — not just the aging of a population, but the aging of a planet. Everyone felt it was the last days. Also, a lot of attention was being focused on us, the vulnerables!

When I could wrap my head around writing at all, because we were all so shellshocked by what was going on, I started working on this novel. I realized, I have all these stories I want to tell, and I have boxes where I began novels that dead-ended or researched a historical figure or had these little jottings. It was so many boxes. You know, when you’re young, you think, Someday I’ll get to that . When you’re old [laughs] and getting older, you know, there’s not going to be time to get to all of them. How do you make peace with that? And how do you make peace with the characters that have been haunting you, and how do you exorcise them?

I started writing and in the midst of it, I had a health crisis. I lost vision in my right eye. And after two major surgeries and a long recovery and not being able to read — the other eye was seeing double — I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish. I was finally fitted with these prism glasses, and I worked very slowly, maybe an hour or two at a time, because of the strain. There was a new urgency to the novel — as if it were the last novel I would ever write.

I’m struck by the way you describe having to work in this more limited, very careful way. Was that a big change from the way you’ve typically written?

I think I’m a little impatient to get something written, usually. And I just had to be patient. It’s not that I didn’t want to grab [the characters] while I could and get it down; it’s just that I couldn’t. So maybe that forced me to be a little more like Filomena in the book — to listen more carefully. And there was, I have to say, ironically — not that it wasn’t hard, as writing is always hard, and bad days are hard — a new joy in the writing. Because I was doing the thing I love that I thought I would never get to do again.

Alma, Filomena and the other characters think a lot about the ethics of storytelling. There are many people in their lives who are angry or irritated by the way their stories have been shared. Has that been on your mind more than it has been in the past?

Of course, I do wonder — I’ve had a lot of flak, especially when she was alive, from my mother. I used to joke that I think every Latina of my generation could start their novel: “Mami told me to keep my mouth shut about this.” A woman wasn’t supposed to have a public voice or bring up certain tricky, sensitive issues. There was that sense of: Are you betraying caution and a sort of courtesy that you were supposed to have for your family? Are you being disloyal to that family, in order to be loyal to the story?

That is always a tension for any thoughtful writer — but also as a writer who comes originally from another homeland, a so-called Third World that has often been exploited for the ease and comfort and pleasure of the First World. Is there a literary version of that? I don’t have any answers; that would be death to the novel. I just have a lot of questions and inquiétudes.

But part of the reason that Alma, a.k.a. Scheherazade, takes her unfinished manuscripts back is to lay them to rest in their native land. It’s a way of bringing them back to where they maybe really belong — and at the same time, giving over the narrative to the storytellers who won’t get their tales told by the big megaphone of the First World.

She also gives that material to Pepito, this younger writer on an academic fellowship, which isn’t going so well, and who really wants her papers. I was so intrigued by this character, because you could have made him this figure of fun, or an interloper, but you didn’t. How did you think about this young writer in relation to the older one?

Well, Pepito is tenure track [laughs] and really sweating about getting this book out and making it acceptable. He’s writing about multicultural writers, ethnic writers and so forth, and has to tie that to canonical writers to boost his subject matter and get it accepted by the people who are going to be deciding his fate. And he experiences a kind of liberation: His encounter with Alma and with the stories buried in the graveyard liberate him to connect with what he was neglecting, out of survival instinct. He represents, as you said, the younger generation. There’s transmission going on. Alma, Julia Alvarez, any living older writer — we might not get the story told. But it’s not “après moi, le déluge.” Someone will come.

One of my events in New York will be with Elizabeth Acevedo and Angie Cruz — and me, la vieja. And in that audience there will be younger versions of all of us, coming forward with stories. I’m just thrilled by that generational unfolding.

I have a bit of a silly question to ask —

Curiosity is never silly.

Well, in an interview you mentioned that there is sometimes a secret soundtrack to which you write your novels. For “Afterlife,” it was a Leonard Cohen song, “Anthem.” Was there one for this book?

Huh. Well, I was listening to a lot of Dominican music, to hear what was going on in the barrio. But I’d have to think about that — and I really should, because I’m trying to develop my hearing intelligence. I’m now certifiably visually impaired, as we’re called. Through a program at the Library of Congress, you can get most books on tape, so that’s been wonderful. But I have to learn to really focus — not with my eyes, but with my listening. Because my mind will stray.

I’m a big birder, and now I’m not able to really make out the birds at the bird feeder, so in the morning, when I’m doing my yoga, I listen to a CD of birdsongs and calls.

In college, I had this professor who was the opposite: He was an expert in birdsong , but lost his hearing, so he started studying the structural color of feathers.

Gosh, doesn’t God have a sense of humor? At the beginning, I said, “Why not my hearing? Why not something else? I need my eyes!” As if we can cherry-pick our afflictions. But when you love something passionately, you’ll find a way. If worse comes to worst, somebody just get me a little chair and prop me up in our small town of Middlebury, [Vt.], and I’ll just be a storyteller. Instead of playing an instrument, I’ll tell stories.

On April 5, at 7 p.m., Julia Alvarez will discuss her new novel with Marie Arana at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW) in Washington.

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Why Don Winslow’s ‘City in Ruins’ will be his last novel

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City in Ruins

By Don Winslow William Morrow: 400 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

It’s the end of the line for Danny and Don.

Don Winslow’s latest novel, “City in Ruins,” the final installment in the Danny Ryan series , will be his last. After 25 novels — seven New York Times bestsellers — Don Winslow is calling it quits.

In April 2022, Winslow announced that with the completion of the Danny Ryan trilogy, he would be turning his attention from the highly popular crime novels that have earned him fans around the world to the political arena. “It feels like my time and energy are better spent in that fight right now,” he said.

Winslow was in a reflective mood when I had lunch with him at Quecho, a Mexican restaurant in Julian, the small mountain town in the eastern part of San Diego County where he has lived for 26 years.

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“I’ve had such a bigger and better career than I ever dreamed of — or probably deserved,” Winslow said. “But I remember back when it wasn’t that way.”

Throughout much of Winslow’s career as a writer, he had to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. He worked for many years as a private detective, served as a photographic safari guide in Kenya and directed summer theater in Oxford, England, to name a few. Although many of these adventures never made their way into his crime stories, they helped him grow as a writer. For example, he said that working in the bush as a safari guide taught him the importance of “seeing things in detail,” but it was often a struggle to get people to pay attention to his work.

“I remember driving up to Laguna Beach,” Winslow recalled, “to go to a bookstore for a book that was set in Laguna Beach. I was supposed to be there for two hours. Nobody came. An hour in, the bookstore owner asked me to lock up and she left!”

Many writers have experiences like this when they are starting out, but Winslow was no longer a novice. After 15 books, widespread attention and acclaim remained out of reach. Even when his surf-noir novel “Savages” was adapted by Oliver Stone, it underperformed at the box office.

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“I got told so often what I wasn’t, that I almost forgot what I was,” Winslow recalled. “I was told you’re not a bestselling writer. You’re not an airport author. You’re a cult author.”

Winslow’s reputation as a crime writer’s crime writer changed when he started working with writer, producer and literary agent Shane Salerno at the Story Factory . A string of bestsellers followed, including “The Cartel” and “ The Border ” from a series of books about the Mexican drug war that featured DEA agent Art Keller. Then came “City on Fire” in 2022 and “City of Dreams” in 2023 from the Danny Ryan series.

“Don is a true artist who wrote books in a beautiful, economic, clean prose style that should be taught in Writing 101,” said Adrian McKinty , the New York Times bestselling author of “The Island” and “The Chain” who also works with Salerno. “Don told his stories in his way and never compromised his ideals or his vision to sell books. But sell books he did. By holding true to his principles and producing gem after gem, he let the audience build and come to him.”

Although Winslow is concluding his long career with “City in Ruins,” the gangster Danny Ryan has been on his mind for a long time.

“I wrote that first sentence of that first book 30 years ago and it hasn’t changed by a syllable,” Winslow said. “And the opening scene hasn’t changed very much at all. I always had this image of this guy laying on that beach, and it’s a beach I’m on every afternoon for six months of the year. I grew up on that beach.”

The saga of Danny Ryan and his rise from small-time leg-breaker to Hollywood mogul parallels Virgil’s “The Aeneid.” The woman who appears on that beach and kicks off a gang war between the Irish and Italian mobs in Providence, R.I., represents Helen of Troy. Danny’s journey to Hollywood, Winslow explained, echoes Aeneas’ journey to Carthage.

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“There’s an incident in ‘The Aeneid’ quite early on where Aeneas is shipwrecked at Carthage, and he walks into a cave. He sees murals of the Trojan War, paintings of his dead friends, his home, all of that is right there on the wall. What could the equivalent of that be? And then it became very obvious: it’s film.”

In “City in Ruins,” the parallels continue when Winslow’s headstrong hero finds himself in Las Vegas. For someone trying to go straight and leave the violence of his gangster past behind him, it’s a curious choice for a new beginning. That’s the charm of Danny Ryan. He’s never the smartest or strongest player in the room. He’s stubborn and loyal to a fault.

“Classically, the definition of a hero in literary terms is he has to have a fatal flaw,” Winslow explained. “The Achilles heel with Danny is loyalty. I get that having grown up in Rhode Island, which is a tiny state with a little bit of a chip on its shoulder. I grew up playing pond hockey and if somebody dropped the gloves on your friend, you dropped the gloves. You didn’t think about who’s right, who’s wrong, you just did it. So I think there’s a lot of that in Danny that leads him to some bad, even dumb decisions.”

Although it takes a while for Danny’s past to catch up with him, “City of Ruins” provides an explosive finish to the trilogy, and is an instant classic in the lexicon of Las Vegas gangster fiction. But it didn’t come easy. Thirty years in the making, Winslow still hadn’t figured out the ending when the first installment was published.

“The chronology was problematic,” Winslow admitted, “but I was very interested in starting the trilogy so that it ended up in Vegas as the mob was fading out and corporate America was taking over.”

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Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author of the “ Gangsterland” series set in Las Vegas , was already a fan of Winslow, but thinks his most recent work will cement his reputation.

“It’s this last ‘City’ trilogy of mob novels that I think will change the way history views Don,” Goldberg said. “He’s not merely a great crime writer, he’s one of the finest chroniclers of this twisted American life, where we are defined not by the good guys, but by who got away with it.”

After working so hard to achieve the success that eluded him for so long, is this really the end of Winslow’s writing career?

Well, yes and no.

“I think I’m done publishing novels,” Winslow said, “but there’s a lot of research I want to do. There’s things I want to learn about. I’ll probably always write, but I’ve made this decision about publishing and it’s pretty firm.”

In addition to the political videos that he creates and shares on his social media accounts, many adaptations of his books are currently in development. “City on Fire,” for example, is getting a movie starring Austin Butler. Winslow and Butler are among the producers on the Sony pic. He will always be a storyteller — Winslow says every one of his novels has been either sold or optioned by Hollywood — just in different media.

Still, Winslow’s exit leaves a massive hole. “It’s a huge loss to the crime writing community,” McKinty said. “For me, Don Winslow and James Ellroy are the two greatest American crime novelists of the last 30 years. His legacy is a tremendous body of work that any novelist would be proud of and the certainty that he took American fiction into extraordinary places that it would never have gone but for him.”

Lou Berney, award-winning author of “November Road” and “ Dark Ride ,” echoes these sentiments. “Don’s retirement from the crime writing community is a gut punch. He’s been such an inspiration to so many writers for such a long time. Every time a new Don Winslow book comes out, it’s a sharp reminder of how good, and how important, crime fiction can be. That’s irreplaceable.”

Winslow, who estimates that he’s spent more time with his fictional characters than actual human beings, is more sanguine about stepping away.

“I don’t want to push it, and I mean it,” Winslow said. “I want to be grateful for where I’ve come and let it go.”

Winslow will be discussing the book during Live Talks Los Angeles on April 11 at 8 p.m. at Moss Theater in Santa Monica.

Ruland is the author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records” and “Make It Stop.”

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The Art of Babar

For more than seven decades, Laurent de Brunhoff painted the adventures of the world’s most beloved elephant.

Laurent de Brunhoff in 2007. He wrote and illustrated more than 45 Babar books after his father’s death. Credit... via de Brunhoff family

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Like his father, Jean, Laurent de Brunhoff trained to be a painter. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse and began making and exhibiting abstract work in oils. But at 21, nine years after his father's death, he decided to carry on the adventures of Babar, his father’s creation, and from then on considered the Babar books his principal artwork.

Mr. de Brunhoff was a master of color and line. When he conceived his stories, he began with an image. If Babar were abducted by aliens, or practiced yoga, what might that look like? He sketched first in pencil, then watercolors, creating dozens of pictures before settling on a final illustration. Each composition advances the story but can also stand alone as a carefully composed painting.

“Babar,” Maurice Sendak said, “is at the very heart of my conception of what turns a picture book into a work of art.” — Penelope Green

“Babar Comes to America” was published in 1965. In this sketch for the book, in which Babar visits that particularly American space, a supermarket, Mr. de Brunhoff made sure to include American brands of the period like Kellogg’s, Heinz and Del Monte. Babar has a bit of trouble navigating the aisles with his shopping cart and causes a traffic jam.

In “Babar’s Little Girl” (1990), Babar and Celeste have their fourth child, Isabelle, after 50 years of marriage. Mr. de Brunhoff had just moved to Connecticut to be with Phyllis Rose, his second wife, and, as he explained, “We let Babar and Celeste have a baby instead of us.” (Ms. Rose, with a pillow stuffed under her shirt, was the model for the pregnant Celeste.)

The vibrant lobster above is an illustration for the color red, from “Babar’s Book of Color” (2004). At right is a scene from “Babar’s Celesteville Games” (2011). (Mr. de Brunhoff had wondered what it might be like if the elephants had their own Olympics.) During the games, Babar’s daughter Flora falls in love with a handsome pole-vaulter named Cory. They take their honeymoon by air, held aloft by a flock of brilliantly colored birds.

In “Babar’s Rescue” (2004), Babar is kidnapped by mysterious striped elephants. In this sketch his youngest daughter, Isabelle, sets off to find him.

Babar’s son Alexander drinks a shrinking potion in “Babar and the Succotash Bird” (2000). The magic bird’s name is a nice coda for Mr. de Brunhoff’s worldview: “Succotash!” the bird tells Alexander. “That is how life is — right mixed with wrong.”

Above, studies for “Babar’s Rescue” and “Babar Visits Another Planet” (2003), in which Babar and his family are abducted by what turn out to be a bunch of fun-loving aliens. Below, cozy domesticity in “Babar and his Family” (2012).

“Babar and I both enjoy a friendly family life,” Mr. de Brunhoff wrote in 1987. “When writing a book, my intention is to entertain, not give a ‘message.’ But still one can, of course, say there is a message in the Babar books, a message of nonviolence.”

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