Books

‘Boom obsesses over every element of design – including the textures and scents of her books, as well as their appearance’

From environmentalist epics to Norse mythology and the re-emergence of Russian cosmism: John Holten surveys the best books of 2018

Michael Muhammad Knight’s is not just a good book of religious scholarship, but a strange, delightful memoir

In a new book, T.J. Clark scours art historical depictions of divinity for clues about our contemporary age

From capitalist realism to acid communism, new anthology K-Punk demonstrates the reach of the late writer’s cultural criticism

Major new volumes by curators RoseLee Goldberg and Catherine Wood document contemporary art’s most rambunctious medium

Talk of the Booker Winning-novel as ‘baffling’ and ‘tough’ suggests such journalists may be more trained in the Burns-ian method than they think

The US writer and filmmaker has created new paths for arts writing and critical thinking, not from wielding a cudgel but by exposing our bruises

On the eve of her Guggenheim retrospective, a new book of esoteric drawings reveals the spiritualism behind Europe’s first abstract artist

Cruel Fiction expresses hope for concrete social movements that imagine a different world than our own

A Nobel Prize-winning writer, a misogynist, a small-town boy with a haughty, big-city gaze: Naipaul’s life was marked by a sense of doubleness

A newly-published collection of the artist’s journals allows silenced voices to speak

A mother’s death, a father’s disinterest: Jean Frémon’s semi-factual biography of the artist captures a life beyond repair

The continued dominance of UK-US writers makes a mockery of the Man Booker’s ‘global outlook’

In Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love, two women repudiate the long-held expectation: get a husband, make babies

In our devotion to computation and its predictive capabilities are we rushing blindly towards our own demise?

With a republished collection of her writing by David Zwirner Books, the Italophile critic is shown to be as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent

How designers are exploring the subject’s elemental role as an agent of political and social change

Publishing elegant, peculiar studies in fine attention and finer craft, how the small London press is producing some of the best writing around

Dolphins, ketamine and leaky realities: Mark Pilkington considers Altered States, 40 years after its release