Marina Abramovic: Long Life, Short Stories by Marina Abramovic (Rizzoli Electa) Approaching her eightieth birthday, Marina Abramović turns inward with a book as unconventional and intimate as the art that made her famous. Neither memoir nor traditional monograph, it unfolds as sketchbook, diary, and personal philosophy, pairing original drawings with candid reflections on love, sex, fear, ancestry, loss, dreams, and creativity. Even a collection of “love spells” finds its place in this idiosyncratic self-portrait. The directness that has defined Abramović’s five-decade career remains wonderfully intact, but here the provocateur gives way to something more private: a revealing glimpse of the emotional, mystical, and frequently humorous woman behind the performance.
The Portrait Miniature: A New History (V&A Museum) by Damiët Schneeweisz Et al. (Thames & Hudson) Small enough to rest in the palm yet capable of carrying enormous emotional weight, portrait miniatures were once intimate messengers of love, memory, status, and identity. This beautifully illustrated history follows the form from the fifteenth century into the early twentieth, placing these exquisite objects within the shifting worlds of fashion, society, and politics while restoring women artists to their essential role in the tradition. Its global perspective expands the story beyond familiar European narratives. With 216 color illustrations, including works reproduced near actual size alongside enlarged details, the book reveals the astonishing precision and psychological richness contained within art’s smallest portraits.
France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists (The Art of Travel) by Nick Trend (Thames & Hudson) What better way to discover France than in the company of the artists who transformed it into art? This enchanting second volume in the Art of Travel series moves from Vigée Le Brun’s Versailles to the Provence of Cézanne and Van Gogh, Picasso’s Riviera, and the creative ferment of Jazz Age Paris. Twelve chapters combine cultural history with thoughtfully devised itineraries, inviting readers into studios, palaces, residences, and landscapes where masterpieces took shape. Bespoke maps and 425 color illustrations add considerable visual pleasure. Part art history, part sophisticated travel guide, it offers an irresistible Grand Tour without requiring a suitcase.
Street Photography Africa by Nadine Barth, Azu Nwagbogu (Thames & Hudson) Across Africa, the street becomes studio, runway, stage, and social document in this exhilarating survey of contemporary photography. Bringing together more than thirty image makers, curators Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu capture a scene alive with fashion, music, dance, architecture, and the kinetic rhythms of urban life. Traditional distinctions between documentary, portraiture, and editorial photography dissolve as skateboarders, rappers, market crowds, and sharply dressed city dwellers claim the frame. Thematic chapters also explore the festivals and creative communities sustaining this flourishing movement. With 230 illustrations, this vibrant volume presents African street photography as confident, inventive, and thrillingly resistant to easy categorization.
Bordeaux Chronicle by Peter Aaron (Vendome) Half a century can transform a landscape, even one as devoted to tradition as Bordeaux. Photographer Peter Aaron first encountered the region in 1969, capturing weathered cellars, unassuming châteaux, and winemaking families whose lives followed the rhythms of the vineyard. Returning in 2024, he discovered architectural ambition, technological sophistication, and a newly international world. His photographs, presented in revealing juxtaposition, form the heart of this evocative chronicle, while wine authority Jane Anson illuminates the economic, cultural, and environmental forces behind the transformation. More than a celebration of fine wine, it is a fascinating portrait of a region reinventing itself without surrendering its soul.
Remembering Giraffes by Margot Raggett MBE (Remembering Wildlife) Few animals possess the giraffe’s peculiar combination of grandeur, elegance, and gentle awkwardness, qualities captured magnificently in this photographic celebration. The eleventh volume in the Remembering Wildlife series brings together breathtaking images donated by 66 leading wildlife photographers, accompanied by reflections from those who know these extraordinary animals best. Beauty, however, carries an urgent message: giraffes have already disappeared from seven African countries and face mounting threats to their survival. With all profits supporting conservation projects, this sumptuous book turns the traditional wildlife volume into something more meaningful, inviting us to marvel at giraffes while helping ensure they remain creatures of the living world, not memory.
Politics Is a Drag by Ashley Longshore (Rizzoli Universe) American presidential portraiture has rarely worn this much glitter. In this gloriously irreverent collection, pop artist Ashley Longshore transforms every U.S. president into extravagant drag royalty, pairing maximalist paintings with outrageous stage names and gleefully mischievous captions. Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Obama, and their fellow commanders-in-chief emerge in rhinestones, wigs, sequins, and saturated color, turning the traditional iconography of power into exuberant visual satire. Lavishly reproduced on glossy pages, the never-before-published portraits revel in the absurdities and theatricality of political image-making. Campy, provocative, and very funny, it offers American history with its powdered wig firmly askew.
Ancient Greece in Fifty Monuments (Ancient Cities in Fifty Monuments) by David Stuttard (Thames & Hudson) Two thousand years after Pericles predicted that Greek monuments would astonish future generations, their power remains undiminished. David Stuttard uses fifty extraordinary sites to explore how fiercely independent city-states nevertheless forged a recognizable Greek identity. From the Parthenon and Delphi to Olympia and Knossos, architecture becomes a language through which rulers and communities proclaimed power, piety, athletic prowess, and cultural ambition. Spanning the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic world, the book pairs accessible scholarship with 200 illustrations and illuminating digital reconstructions. Both armchair journey and cultural history, it makes the vanished world surrounding these familiar ruins thrillingly tangible.
This is Photography: The First 200 Years by Nathalie Herschdorfer (Thames & Hudson) From the first attempts to trap light on a surface to a world producing nearly two trillion images annually, photography has transformed not only what we record but how we see. This sweeping bicentennial survey charts that revolution chronologically, pairing landmark images with the cameras, inventions, exhibitions, and publications that reshaped the medium. Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Zanele Muholi appear alongside scientific breakthroughs such as Rosalind Franklin’s DNA imaging and less expected discoveries. Expansive yet remarkably accessible, the volume turns two centuries of technical ingenuity and artistic experimentation into a fascinating biography of the modern image.
Monet Abroad: Paintings and Letters 1863-1917 by Florence Gentner (Thames & Hudson) Long before travel became synonymous with leisure, Claude Monet treated it as a restless search for light. This sumptuous visual journey follows the painter across twenty destinations, from Étretat and Antibes to London and Venice, revealing how changing landscapes, weather, and atmosphere continually transformed his palette. Some 250 works are placed in conversation with more than one hundred letters, sketches, notebook excerpts, and the circumstances surrounding their creation. With 300 color illustrations and insightful commentary, the familiar master of water lilies emerges as something more unexpected: an obsessive observer and quietly adventurous traveler, forever chasing the next reflection, haze, shadow, or shimmer.
The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon by Wanda M. Corn (Princeton) How did one stern-faced couple and a pitchfork become shorthand for America itself? Wanda Corn follows Grant Wood’s American Gothic from its startling 1930 debut to its extraordinary second life in cartoons, advertising, Pop art, political commentary, and countless parodies. Along the way, she illuminates Wood’s unlikely rise and the painting’s shifting critical fortunes, while weaving in her own encounters with the work across a lifetime in art history. Abundantly illustrated and wonderfully readable, this is as much a study of cultural celebrity as of a painting, revealing how an artwork escapes the museum and becomes part of our collective visual language.
The Age of Alchemy: The Secret History of Chemistry from Ancient Magic to Modern Science by Kit Chapman (Greystone Books) Chemistry has rarely sounded this entertaining. Kit Chapman transforms four thousand years of experiments, accidents, obsessions, and occasional charlatanism into a wonderfully lively history of how humanity learned to manipulate matter. Beginning with Tappūtī, the ancient Iraqi perfumer who practiced sophisticated chemical techniques three millennia ago, the story travels through Egyptian tombs, Chinese quests for immortality, dazzling pigments, medicines, poisons, and ultimately nuclear physics. Along the way, forgotten women, artisans, and ingenious fraudsters enliven the science. Accessible without dumbing anything down, this is chemistry liberated from the classroom: strange, consequential, surprisingly human, and genuinely fun to read.
On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction by Dr. Lixing Sun (Basic Books) When it comes to sex, nature makes human conventions look positively unimaginative. In this delightfully provocative exploration of reproduction, biologist Lixing Sun introduces a world where slime molds boast hundreds of mating types, clownfish change sex, and certain lizards reproduce without partners. Drawing on decades of research, he unravels the evolutionary ingenuity behind these extraordinary arrangements, challenging familiar assumptions about biology, gender, and the reproductive imperative. Scientific rigor never gets in the way of a good story, and Sun delivers plenty of surprises with wit and infectious curiosity. The result is a wonderfully entertaining reminder that nature wrote the original book on sexual experimentation.
