The Work of Art, by Adam Moss (Penguin Press). This collection of interviews, by a former editor of New York, aims to illuminate artists’ processes through conversation. The novelist Michael Cunningham describes writing first thing in the morning to avoid getting “lost in the realness of the real world”; the visual artist Kara Walker recounts beginning one project by drawing with her feet (“I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious”). Moss’s footnotes flag common themes, including tenacious work ethics, mentorship, and iterative revisions. His subjects’ accounts are enriched by color images of works in progress: the outline of a concerto (Nico Muhly), a line of poetry scribbled in a faculty meeting (Louise Glück).
The Other Olympians, by Michael Waters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the nineteen-thirties, one of the most famous trans people in the world was Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech running champion who transitioned to live as a man. This book, which examines the Fascist response to Koubek and other early trans athletes, focusses on a time when cross-dressing was a criminal offense, Olympians drank brandy before their races, and athletes like Koubek were largely regarded as marvels rather than threats. (In 1936, crowds eager to see a scientific miracle flocked to a cabaret show to watch Koubek run on a treadmill.) Waters is interested less in competition than in the deals that made Germany the host of the 1936 Olympics, and led Hitler’s sympathizers to begin the sporting industry’s ongoing project of defining womanhood.
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The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin (HarperVia). Set in a small town in northwestern Ireland in 1994, this finely wrought début novel depicts the limited options that were available to unhappily married women in that country prior to the referendum that legalized divorce there, the following year. It centers on the friendship between a poet who has returned to town as a pariah after a scandalous affair in Dublin and the discontented wife of a local politician. Murrin powerfully renders the ways that women’s freedom, individuality, and self-expression are stifled by religion, custom, and gossip, and, as one character reflects, how “bitterness could poison a life, could make you lousy with exhaustion.”
Housemates, by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hogarth). The events of this novel are set off by the death of a brilliant but disgraced photography professor, who leaves his negatives, his cameras, and an immovable installation to a former student. The student, Bernie, and her friend Leah, who live in a queer collective in Philadelphia, embark on a road trip together to collect the inheritance. During the journey, the two take photographs and write, respectively, eventually assembling the results in a project titled “Changing Pennsylvania.” (The characters are loosely inspired by the modernist artists Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, who, more than eighty years earlier, planned a similar work, “Changing New York.”) Throughout, Copley Eisenberg meditates on art-making, community-building, and how the two are entwined.