So much has been said about John Berger over the past five decades that it almost feels trite to pile on. You know the familiar takeaways: that the critic and novelist taught us how to look and pay attention, believed art belongs to the people, exposed how the male gaze shapes our perception. So, it’s especially astounding that a new biography by Tom Overton has managed to both capture the scope of Berger’s influence and reframe him, first and foremost, as human.
Author Megan O’Grady, who reflects on many of the same questions as Berger in her recent book How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, penned a sensitive review of the biography and its approach to addressing the complex personal life of this near-mythologized figure. It’s a poignant, refreshing read, and reminds me of the conversation around the sanctification of artists and writers like James Baldwin, whose work gets flattened in the process.
In fact, how we tell the story of an artist’s life (and afterlife) just might be our primary preoccupation this month. Lauren Moya Ford reads one scholar’s novel approach to the canonized Vermeer, searching for the influence of his signature narrative ambiguity across mediums and forms. Meanwhile, Lavinia Liang grapples with a biography of Dorothea Tanning and its treatment of her relationship with her artist husband, Max Ernst, a perennial dilemma facing any author who seeks to move an overlooked woman’s legacy out of the shadow of her male partner.
More from our critics below, plus a round-up of some of our favorite recent art books on textiles, fabric, and fiber art. One of my personal go-tos is Stories in the Seams: A People’s History of Black Quilts and Their Makers by the wonderful Sharbreon Plummer, and we also recommend books on Palestinian embroidery, Diné weaving, and the Bayeux Tapestry. Read up, and let us know what’s on your list this month!
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
12 Must-Read Books on Textiles and Fiber Art
There’s a reason the lexicon of textiles and fiber lends itself so well to storytelling — we thread the needle, weave the tale, spin the yarn. Writers have reached for these metaphors for centuries because they feel true to life, but artists know they’re also true to craft and its tangled histories. We’ve gathered a few recent books on embroidery, fiber art, weaving, and more that deserve a closer look, from Black Southern quilting and Korean bojagi to Palestinian tatreez and contemporary Diné weaving. Refreshingly, so many of these titles complicate or refuse reductive, familiar frameworks and open up new ways to understand the meditative and political dimensions of textile traditions, moving past the false dichotomy of “craft versus art” and sexist and tired notions of “women’s work.” You might even say these books piece together a new history of textile art, stitch by stitch.
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Discover R. Buckminster Fuller’s Intuition
New from David Zwirner Books: R. Buckminster Fuller’s lyrical case for intuition as the force uniting the sciences and the arts. Originally written in 1968 by the creator of the geodesic dome, this concise work returns with a new introduction by Anahid Nersessian as part of the ekphrasis series.
From Our Critics
John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so. | Megan O’Grady
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Finding Vermeer in Unexpected Places
Artists, filmmakers, poets, and the art market itself still bear traces of the Dutch painter’s influence, writes historian Ruth Bernard Yeazell. | Lauren Moya Ford
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The Trafficker Who Furnished the Museums of LA
A team of researchers excavates the story of Earl Stendahl, a mid-century gallerist who shamelessly stole ancient Mesoamerican objects and marketed them to the institutional art world. | Armando Pulido
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Dorothea Tanning Beyond Max Ernst’s Shadow
A new biography attempts to make the case for Tanning’s independence and artistic strength in her own right, but remains frustratingly tethered to her husband. | Lavinia Liang
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Bold New Books in Art and Visual Culture from the MIT Press
From activist art and trans aesthetics to lowriders, global skateboarding culture, and Vilém Flusser’s prescient vision of the screen age.
In the News
- Authors Alana Hadid and Jenan Matari pulled their children’s book on Palestine from Penguin after the editors reportedly asked them to temper the language they used to describe decolonial history. Happily, the title is now going to InterLink Books, the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States, run by author Hannah Moushabeck and her family.
- In related news, bookstores in the United Kingdom are rushing to get copies of Sally Rooney’s novels from distributors after the government banned the sale of her books over her support for Palestine Action.
Required Reading
- For Hyperallergic, Isabella Segalovich interviewed journalist, champion of the avant-garde, and Pop-art connoisseur Joan Kron ahead of the release of her memoir, fabulously titled The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art: A Memoir of The 1960s, coming out in December from Pointed Leaf Press.
- Alissa Quart reflects on 25 years since the publication of Nickel and Dimed by the late Barbara Ehrenreich, with whom she co-founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, for the Nation.
- Architecture writer Kate Wagner tackles a new book chronicling the inequality of American public bathrooms for an article in the Baffler with a perfect title.
- Rosalyn Drexler is everywhere this fall, particularly in New York. Essayist Leslie Camhi writes in the New Yorker about the late artist and author’s resurgence in galleries, bookstores, and museums across the city.
What We're Reading
Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
I’m digging into Story Telling: A Writing Life (2026), Isabel Allende’s new memoir of nearly five decades spent on her craft (thank you to the unusually short hold queue at the Brooklyn Public Library). At 84, she speaks plainly about approaching death; not fearfully or morosely but with reverence for the life she has led and the writing that animates it. I do find it telling that the original Spanish title is La Palabra Mágica: Una Vida Escrita. “The Magic Word” certainly feels more true to Allende’s literary worlds. Maybe I should put a library hold on a Spanish copy, too …
Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Halloween’s coming up, so you know I had to revisit a ghost story that one could argue invented the form: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).
From the Archive
John Berger Lost His Eyesight to Cataracts and Learned to See
After being afflicted with cataracts, the late critic and novelist reflected on the mechanics of sight. | Melissa Holbrook Pierson
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