Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting
A monograph supporting Joan Miró’s fifth major exhibition at New York’s MoMA is no substitute for being there, but the nearly 200 image volume does have its advantages.
Book Digest
A collection of 274 issues
The Man Who Owns the News
Vanity Fair columnist and news aggregator Newser founder Michael Wolff has shined a light on today’s messy media jungle by focusing on one of the increasingly powerful media empire owners, Rupert Murdoch.
Tinkers
The debut novel from Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate Paul Harding centers on a dying man’s reveries and hallucinations—a recurring literary trope—offering “a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses.”
Books About Books
Two new books about books alternately cover anonymous authorship and the history of the destruction of books. Whether or not they are “meta” is open for debate.
The Ghost in Love
In his new novel, expatriate Jonathan Carroll—“master of sunlit surrealism”—presents a lovelorn ghost as the center of a morality tale wrapped in fable.
Demons in the Spring
Joe Meno anthologizes a collection of short stories—illustrated and designed by some very popular names in the industry—with a part of the proceeds going to Dave Eggers’s writing workshop.
Lincoln Logorrhea
In his cabinet choices, as in his home state, our president-elect mirrors our 16th president. Gore Vidal’s historical novel about Lincoln helps to balance the dozens of more rigid bios.
Poetry As Insurgent Art
On Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s lifelong work in progress, plus a 50th-anniversary edition of “A Coney Island of the Mind.”
The Chicagoan
The Second City citizen’s eponymous magazine, which initially ran from 1926 to 1935, is revived in the form of a well-produced, well-illustrated coffee table book.
Voices in Chicago
To put President-elect Obama’s best speeches in a historical context, pick up former presidential speechwriter William Safire’s collection of great examples, or two like compendiums from the Library of America.