With the holiday season not a long way off, the eagerest shoppers among you may already be drafting your gifting lists. Happily, you’ll find that the book lovers in your life are well looked after this season—whether they’re drawn to design or photography, painters or writers, food or travel, there’s something for everyone.
Simon Upton’s first monograph, New York Interiors, chronicles the many fashionable homes he’s visited and Synagogues: Marvels of Judaism (Rizzoli) considers some of the most significant—and breathtaking—houses of worship in the world. From Aperture comes a different perspective with the haunting Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street and the deeply personal Gillian Laub: Family Matters, in which both artists consider questions of space, community, and culture. And Assouline gives us Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde Orientalists, a dazzling look at the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art’s (considered the “the Louvre of the Steppes”) collectsion of works inspired by Uzbekistan.
The artist’s perspective more broadly is celebrated in Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy, which is bursting with Hockney’s saturated lockdown nature studies; Judy Chicago: In the Making, which surveys an intrepid career of feminist art; A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, the final chapter in John Richardson’s epic and incisive series; and Toyin Ojih Odutola: The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, in which illustrated tales of two fictional Nigerian families are coupled with essays by Zadie Smith and other writers.
Memoirs and biographies are in similarly high supply: Franny Moyle’s The King’s Painter: The Life of Hans Holbein, bidding readers to Tudor England; Ann Marks’s riveting Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny; and Naomi Parry’s Amy Winehouse: Beyond Black, arriving 10 years after the singer’s tragic death. Film fans will get a kick out of Garbo by Robert Gottlieb, a seductive portrait of one of Hollywood’s most beguiling women, and Solid Ivory: Memoirs, from the director and screenwriter James Ivory (one half of Merchant Ivory Productions).
For the writerly, there’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis, while Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen and New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian by Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli add new flavor to the culinary catalog. Then there’s in Home: A Celebration, edited by Charlotte Moss, in which figures as wonderfully different as Julian Fellowes, Lee Radziwill, Gloria Steinem, and Al Roker all agree that there’s no place like it—especially for the holidays.
Browse all of those volumes—and a heaping armful more—in the list below.
