What to Read This Spring

The Places of Marguerite Duras | Marguerite Duras and Michelle Porte. Translated by Alison Strayer

In 1976, Michelle Porte interviewed the French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras for French television at Duras’s home in Yvelines and her apartment in Trouville – two places where she lived, wrote and made films. Nearly five decades after the conversation was first published in book form by Les Éditions de Minuit, Magic Hour Press has brought out an English-language translation by Alison Strayer. Duras’s reflections on life and work are interspersed with family photos, landscapes, domestic interiors and film stills. Duras was attuned to the powerful hold that places exert upon us – what Durga Chew-Bose’s gemlike introduction calls ‘a presence Duras could not ignore’. Here, the French icon casts the home as a psychic space, an engine of plot, a maker of witches, even a form of cinema.

– CASSIE PACKARD, assistant editor

Selected Writings | Okwui Enwezor

This two-volume landmark collection arrives nearly six years after the art world lost one of its most significant and admired curators. Spanning a quarter century, during which Enwezor transformed curatorial and critical thinking, these two books are essential for their decolonial frameworks, ‘diasporic imagination’ and ‘New African Art Discourse’, which underpinned his life’s project. Readers will encounter the ideas and theories behind group exhibitions such as Documenta 11 (2002) and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), alongside insights into the individual artists whose practices he championed.

– MARKO GLUHAICH, senior editor

The Only Face | Hervé Guibert

Hervé Guibert’s The Only Face (1984) is the second – and last – collection of photographs the French artist and writer made in his lifetime. This edition, published by Magic Hour Press, marks its first appearance in the English-speaking world. It follows Suzanne and Louise (1980), his ‘photo-novel’ about his two aunts in which photographs of the women are interspersed with Guibert’s reflections on their relationship. The Only Face is wordless, but no less intimate or poignant, documenting his lovers and friends during travels across Europe and the United States. Published at the onset of the AIDS crisis, which would claim Guibert and many of his friends, there is no sign of the unfolding catastrophe in these serene images. But that, of course, was not his aim: ‘I am doing only one thing – an enormous thing,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘in any case the goal of all my work, all my creative pretension –  which is this: to bear witness to my love.’

– ANDREW DURBIN, editor-in-chief

Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems | Essex Hemphill

This past March, New Directions released a revelatory new collection of Essex Hemphill’s writing that underscores his enduring influence as a poet and AIDS activist. Hemphill’s work – raw, urgent and necessary – continues to resonate today. As poet Danez Smith reflects in our upcoming May issue: ‘Hemphill was dangerous. Is dangerous. The danger he embodied saved lives, mine included. I am alive and somewhat sane because he wrote with such bravery and clarity, with every fibre of his being behind the pen.’ Beyond the page, Hemphill’s legacy takes centre stage in ‘Take Care of Your Blessings’, an exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, exploring his impact through archival materials and contemporary responses to his work. Whether in print or inside a museum, this spring offers vital opportunities to engage with Hemphill’s fearless vision.

– TERENCE TROUILLOT, senior editor

Audition | Katie Kitamura

An actress meets a younger man for lunch and notices her husband walk into the same restaurant – even though he should be in a different part of town. From this starting point, Katie Kitamura’s latest novel unfolds into an exploration of performance, legibility, the complexities of relationships and what we owe to those we love. Audition probes the gaps between fact and fiction, our interior and exterior selves: what we know of ourselves, and how we are perceived by others. There are several narrative shifts and twists: one in the middle, another towards the end. As in life itself, the book offers no clear-cut resolution. It is a rare novel that I finished and wanted to immediately re-read – to see what I might have missed, to trace the clues the author may have offerred throughout. Kitamura’s mastery of language and plot ensures that Audition will stay with me for a long time.

– VANESSA PETERSON, senior editor

Matriarch | Tina Knowles

From what wondrous vessel did Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and her sister, Solange Knowles, spring? The answer, of course, is Tina Knowles – or Miss Tina, or Mamma Tina, as she is affectionately known by family, friends and fans alike. Knowles’s first memoir, Matriarch, released this April, promises a closer look at the woman behind this legendary diva dynasty – from her upbringing during the civil rights era in Charleston, Texas, to mothering two of the most influential Black women in music history. Knowles is known for her quiet strength, her keen sense of Black pride and her warm humour. As a fully paid-up member of the Beyhive, I can’t wait to read more about the only Queen Mother I acknowledge.

– CLAUDIA KENSANI, publishing and events manager

Stag Dance  | Torrey Peters

 The adage ‘hurt people, hurt people’ finds its apex in Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance. Across these stories, taciturn characters, unable to express their true selves, lash out in breathless acts of cruelty. Gender identity links the ‘three novellas and a novel’ that comprise this book, which jumps from a post-apocalyptic Seattle to a Quaker boarding school to an illegal logging camp to a party on the Las Vegas Strip. While her Detransition, Baby (2021) addressed similar themes, Peters’s characterization shines here, particularly in the titular story, which is told from the perspective of a 19th-century logger. Strong as an ox, his stifling world shifts when he is given the opportunity to attend the camp dance ‘as a lady’ – an act that places him in direct competition with a younger, prettier jack.

– CHLOE STEAD, associate editor

Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon | Sue Tilley

I’ve just finished reading Sue Tilley’s biography of her mate Leigh Bowery, resissued by Thames & Hudson to coincide with a survey of Bowery’s work at Tate Modern, London. It’s a matter of fact, three-dimensional insight into a figure so often reduced to buzzwords like ‘outrageous’ and ‘provocative’ by a contemporary culture hooked on marketing speak. Tilley portrays the celebrated performance artist and club denizen as a character of contradictions: tender and forbidding, domestic and alien, charming and – honestly – a downright danger. The Lucian Freud connection isn’t the most interesting thing about Bowery. If you pick this very readable book up, you can hear about his camp trips to the coast, deliberate tumbles down flights of stairs, forays into daytime television, fallouts with hen-pecked minions and endless nights on poppers and vodka with Trojan – the devil really is in the details.

– SEAN BURNS, associate editor (acting)

On Breathing | Jamieson Webster

Jamieson Webster’s new book On Breathing draws connections between the physical act of respiration and broader themes of interconnectedness, care and collective vulnerability. Merging psychoanalytic theory with personal experience, Webster thoughtfully explores what it means to breathe today, right now. From our first inhale to our last exhale, breathing is both deeply personal and universally shared, dependant on the air that connects us all. I hope On Breathing is a reminder of the vital role air plays in uniting us – and the profound privilege that comes with the simple act of breathing.

–  BROOKE WILSON, image researcher

Careless People | Sarah Wynn-Williams

If, like me, you love a bit of tech-world tea, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s new book delivers. Set in Silicon Valley, it unpacks the chaos, ambition and wilful ignorance that defined her time at Meta – where blind optimism and crisis management often passed as strategy. With sharp insight and dark humour, she exposes just how recklessly one of the world’s most powerful companies operated. Meta tried to bury this story, but luckily for us, she’s saved the receipts.

– FARZANA YASMIN, editorial production assistant

Absence | Issa Quincy

At the end of last year, I read Issa Quincy’s short story ‘Fisherboy’ – one of the only pieces of his writing available online. The rhythm of Quincy’s prose is almost baroque: that short story is written in one long, ecstatic paragraph, memories and fragments of dialogue melting into a near-perfect screed. With his debut novel being published this May, I’m looking forward to seeing how his distinctive writing stretches out to fill a book; to dipping in and out of his stylish-yet-spare sentences. ‘An elusive narrator is beguiled by a poem’, the book’s description begins and – if Quincy’s novel lives up to the promise of his previous work – I hope I’ll be beguiled by Absence, too. 

– LOU SELFRIDGE, assistant editor (interim)