Merry Christmas to anyone celebrating today! If your year were a bookshelf, what would it look like? My March would be sparse with a layer of dust, populated only by Toni Morrison and a vampire-witch romance novel. Blasphemous. August would be spilling over with novels connected to art somehow (Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio) and poetry collections, both good (Things You May Find In My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha) and very bad (redacted). So far, my December shelf has been colored by introspective memoirs, lovable characters (Piranesi by Susanna Clarke), and a desire to read more art books
in 2025. At Hyperallergic, our collective year in the form of a bookshelf — a “books wrapped,” if you will — is stuffed to the brim. We published over 100 articles about books, chatted with countless indie publishers, and selected 30 top art books of 2024. The magic of that ever-nebulous term, “art book,” is that it empowers us as readers and writers to take a creative approach to literature that grapples with the visual. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, one of our favorites of the year, pushed this category beyond its conventional boundaries and bears the fingerprints of a novelist who is also a poet. Akbar spoke with Turkish author Orhan Pamuk about his newly published journals dotted with illustrations and sketches. Both writers, it turns out, are also secretly painters. Cree artist Kent Monkman is another painter who is also secretly a writer. Joseph M. Pierce’s review explores time and Indigeneity in Monkman’s narration of the history of Turtle Island through the voice of his gender-nonconforming alter-ego, who regularly appears in his paintings. Artists like Thomas Cole, on the other hand, were instrumental in carrying colonial fictions about North America forward, explored in a catalog excerpt by Akwesasne Mohawk curator Scott Manning Stevens. Meanwhile, writer Jasmine Weber tackled the art world’s legacy of inequality chronicled in a book that summarizes recent activism in our field and, she argues, misdiagnoses its source. Among these pieces that rewired the way I think about literature and art, I imagine more book spines populating our shelf of a year: Sarah Rose Sharp’s review of a photo book by Rosalind Fox Solomon offered an incisive assertion of women and aging; an interview with scholar Sarah Lewis highlights the role of visual culture in shoring up racial regimes; a photo book documents Palestine before the Nakba; Bridget Quinn’s review of an Esther Pressoir biography offers a peek into the overlooked artist’s itinerant life. And today, read about Sandro Botticelli's 16th-century “Mystic Nativity,” the only work he ever signed, and enjoy Hyperallergic’s Art Tarotscope for the winter equinox.
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