Even my escapist fiction-reading wasn’t immune to Moo Deng this week, and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. I was sitting on the G train when a delightful overlap took me by surprise: A hippo cited in Producer Isabella Segalovich’s overview of Moo Deng’s predecessors popped up in Elif Shafak’s sprawling epic There Are Rivers In the Sky. The
novel follows a single drop of water and a Mesopotamian lamassu sculpture across centuries, and aside from the occasionally saccharine language, the book is a refreshing consideration of an “artifact” from the human vantage points that give it meaning in the first place. As we ease into fall reading here in the office, our contributors were largely preoccupied with new vantage points, too. Critic Alexandra M. Thomas calls a catalog on Elizabeth Catlett, a radical artist who was exiled after the US government deemed her work too political, “a necessary contribution to the rich, global genealogy of radical Black art histories.” Writer Raquel Gutiérrez similarly meditates on the artists who live out their political values in a review of scholar and novelist Yxta Maya Murray’s new book, which takes a magnifying glass to artistic practices rooted in critiques of the law. Read reviews focused on a secret garden at Black Mountain College, the peregrinations of a lost Gauguin, and much more below, plus an excerpt from longtime Hyperallergic contributor Michael Glover’s book of poetry dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. My inner van Gogh enthusiast relished especially in “Cypresses,” in which the poet describes those enthralling post-Impressionist skies as exactly what they are: “thick curdlings of cloud, / Dense and clotty as whipped cream.” — Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
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