Art Newsletter No. 42 covers the art and illustrations in the April 9 and April 26 issues of the Review, and it comes to you from the kitchen sink. I’ve always loved the term “kitchen sink.” It can mean a surplus of something, as in “kitchen sink cookies,” which contain pretzels, gummy bears, or whatever’s on hand; or it can mean a kind of working-class realism, as in the “kitchen sink realism” of postwar British dramas, set in cold-water flats and bedsits. I sometimes like to stop and appreciate the random still lifes that form inside my kitchen sink: a marble repository, variously filled with wilted flowers, carrot peels, dirty dishes, and sponges.

The cover of our April 9 issue is a 2023 painting titled Orange Squeeze, by the New York–based artist Rachel Domm. After unintentionally designing two covers in a row that featured paintings of people bundled up, Domm’s cheery, bright depiction of a thumb and finger holding a citrus was a welcome promise of vitamin C, and spring.

For Pablo Scheffer’s review of two books about tennis rivalries, I found a lemon-lime-colored print of a court scene by the artist Leah Horowitz. For an essay by Yi-Ling Liu about the remarkable pace of construction in the city of Shenzhen, I wrote to George Wylesol for an illustration. He sent a clever sketch of a stable reflection of a wobbly cityscape skyline, followed by the colorful final. Romy Blümel sent a crimson-haired Muriel Spark portrait for Miranda Seymour’s essay on a new biography of the Dame, as well as an edition of her letters. For Ben Lerner’s introduction to a new edition of John Berger’s novel G., Adrian Tomine drew a handsome, cigarette-puffing Berger, staring into the middle distance.

I loved reading Dan Rockmore’s essay on four books about the art of mathematics. All the numbers and pebbles he mentioned reminded me of paintings by the artist Jule Korneffel. Her bright pink and green Kaktüsse, featuring thirteen slightly irregular orbs, went perfectly with the piece. On Instagram Korneffel wrote, “Mathematics has always been part of my DNA—my father was a mathematician, and—I believe—his way of thinking profoundly shaped my approach to abstraction. Before words, there were numbers; I experienced them as vivid, distinct fields of color from an early age.”

Laura Breiling is great at packing plot and detail into her portraits, which is why I thought of her after reading Omari Weekes’s review of Tyriek White’s Brooklyn-based novel We Are a Haunting. She drew White surrounded by ghosts in Jamaica Bay. I loved the lines from Gizella Hervay’s poem “Superior Pink Toilet Soap” that Ange Mlinko quotes in her essay about a collection of poetry by Hungarian women. This kitchen-sink-adjacent subject reminded me that the photographer Jason Fulford had visited Hungary in 2000, so I asked him to send some of his work from that trip. He had a wonderful image of women’s hats in a Budapest shop window. The illustrator Karagh Byrne had written me a few times, inquiring about a commission, so I offered her Cathleen Schine’s review of Steve Stern’s novel A Fool’s Kabbalah. She drew a fine-lined Stern sporting a scarf.

The playful, twisty series art, titled “Ductwork,” is by the designer Oliver Munday.

The April 23 issue was our Spring Books issue, and the cover was a sort of whodunit, drawn and lettered by the Paris-based illustrator Fanny Blanc. Her first sketch of a tea party included a naked man gardening outside. We asked her to go a bit further, so her second draft put a body beneath a bush. Blanc wrote to me, “On a table, there are gardening gloves, perhaps repurposed; a shoe lies on the floor; a pot contains a datura plant (for its toxicity, even though it's not exactly the season, as they normally bloom in early summer).”

For an essay by an anonymous resident of Tehran about the experience of living under siege, we considered some wire images of the city, but at the last minute we opted for something a little less familiar, a painting of rooftops—one of the motifs in the essay—that I did in 2022. (The view is in fact of the Lower East side, not Tehran.)

Francine Prose reviewed two colorful novels, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach, and after reading Prose’s descriptions of the prosthetics, diapers, assault weapons, and sex dolls in the books, I asked the illustrator Paul Davis if he was up for the task.

I hadn’t worked with Jason Kernevich, from the design firm The Heads of State, for a few months, and I wondered what they might do with David Cole’s essay about birthright citizenship. All the sketches they sent in were wonderful, some playing with hospital-issue pink and blue baby blankets, but we went with one that featured infant footprints and post office return stamps. For Hermione Lee’s essay about Virginia Woolf’s letters, I wanted to see what Yann Kebbi might do with Woolf’s famous and fabulous face. He took the job and sent us a wonderfully woeful ink likeness.

Georgie McAusland illustrated Trevor Jackson’s review of two books about retirement. She sent sketches of a protest march made up of senior citizens. I asked Alain Pilon for a drawing of Alfred Tennyson to accompany Kathryn Hughes’s article about Tennyson and science, and he sent a sensitive sketch of the poet. His work increasingly reminds me of drawings by the late Pierre Le-Tan, whose art, along with Jean-Michel Folon’s, inspired me, at age fifteen, to study editorial illustration.

Maybe it was too easy, but I asked an Italian to draw the Italian writer Domenico Starnone for Tim Parks’s review of his newest novel. Andrea Ventura never disappoints, and his rough-hewn likeness of the novelist fell in nicely and unexpectedly with the Kebbi and Pilon. We tucked a new collage by our longtime contributor Lucy Sante into the issue, from a show currently up at the Academy of Arts and Letters.

The series art in the Spring Books issue is titled “Textile Library,” by Ciara Quilty-Harper.

The world can be divided, I think, into two camps: those who like to play games and those who do not. I plant myself firmly in the former group. I love charades, Bananagrams, and Paperback, in which players are prompted to guess the first line of a book based solely on the cover. I love a bet, a joke, a test. I’m a quietly competitive person. Though I’m a terrible singer, I love karaoke, like most Filipinos. This forty-second newsletter, covering the art in the March 12 and March 26 issues, is brought to you from my dedicated charades night. I have a group of friends who’ve met regularly for the past fifteen years to share home-cooked suppers and play games together. In these horrifying times we carve out a few hours every month or so for some existential relief, laughing so hard we need to either pee or curl up on the floor. At this point, our bar for clues is high. “Gone with the Wind” is child’s play. We prefer “Adobe InDesign CS5.” (I documented some of the group twelve years ago for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)

The cover of the March 12 issue is a painting titled Coat Zipper (2024), by the Philadelphia-based artist Aubrey Levinthal. Levinthal has contributed paintings for a few of our reviews, most recently a Michael Kazin essay about American history in June last year.

I thought the winter-set, parka-hooded figure in Coat Zipper, foregrounded by a shadow, evoked the images coming out of Minnesota, of protests and varietals of ice. The art gallery David Zwirner recently made a selection of Levinthal’s monotypes available to view online.

The Buenos Aires–based illustrator Sol Cotti made a portrait of the novelist Diana McCaulay surrounded by Jamaican flora and parish life for Colin Grant’s review of her latest novel. And for Edward Mendelson’s essay about the early-twentieth-century popular novelist Margaret Kennedy, Grant Shaffer made a pink-inky likeness of the doe-eyed writer.

I was happy to discover that the Montreuil-based Yann Kebbi is a big Bernie Sanders fan, and, despite a busy schedule, he took on a drawing of the Vermont senator for Thomas Powers’s review of Dan Chiasson’s recent Bernie biography. (Our illustrators often have less than a week to go from assignment to sketch to final art. This is short, in publishing terms. Not as short as, say, The New York Times op-ed page, where illustrators sometimes have only a few hours, but much shorter than, say, The New Yorker, where lead times can be a number of weeks.)

I’ve been assigning the Montrealer Alain Pilon a lot of portraits lately, but for Linda Greenhouse’s essay about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s memoir—and his legacy—I asked him to go back to his talent for sharp conceptual thinking.

Essays about dance and theater often bring to mind James McMullan’s legendary posters for Lincoln Center, so I emailed him after reading Marina Harss on Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet The Art of the Fugue. He agreed to the assignment, and as always, his figures—so alive—animate the text.

We wanted a portrait of Gisèle Pelicot for Elaine Blair’s review of her memoir. I thought Camille Deschiens’s sensitive, pensive style might suit the depth of the subject and crossed my fingers that she was available. I was touched when she accepted the assignment and wrote, “Thank you for your trust.”

The series art in the issue, titled Keiner Worte (No Words), is by the Paris-based artist Simone Goder.

The cover art for the March 26 issue, Cold Weather (2023), is by Henni Alftan. This is her second cover for us, after we used her painting Tiptoeing for our December 8, 2022, issue. I’ve been trying to get more graphic with the covers, in part because of the vagaries of print quality but also because I try to imagine our issues as they might appear in my periphery: flung on a coffee table or poking out from a tote bag. (Speaking of graphic covers and tote bags, we’ve made our November 30, 1972, cover into a handsome, sturdy tote bag.)

Alftan’s pop optic grid of a coat is a perfect example of the kind of bold and captivating image I’m looking for. Something with contrast and crackle. I’d originally wanted to place the issue’s cover lines on the figure’s hand, but Alftan pushed back on that idea, arguing it would ruin the composition, which I agreed with and appreciated.

I read Anne Enright’s intense foray into one day of the typo-riddled Epstein emails and knew I could find some existing art that we might run alongside the essay. The Mexican multimedia artist Rachel Levit Ruiz’s work involving women and bodies is always fresh and strong. Scrolling through her website I found a sculpture that both was disturbing and seemed to reference the redactions the Department of Justice made to the emails.

Lorenzo Gritti made a loose portrait of Andrew Ross Sorkin for Jacob Weisberg’s review of Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash.

The UK-based illustrator Maya Chessman framed her portrait of the writer David Greig in an intricate Book of Kells–inspired border for Meghan O’Gieblyn’s review of Greig’s novel The Book of I. Tom Bachtell was a natural choice to caricature Jeff Bezos for Robert G. Kaiser’s essay on what the billionaire has done to The Washington Post. Kaiser was an editor and reporter at the Post for more than fifty years, so he’s well positioned to comment on Bezos’s recent decimation of the institution.

David Cole has been on a tear for us recently—in the last month alone, he has written about the war in Iran, Trump’s tariffs, and affirmative action. After I accidentally sent the designer Lisa Naftolin the wrong Cole essay, she graciously redrafted her illustration when I followed up with the right assignment—in this case, the article about the future of affirmative action in academia. We chose a conceptual image that relied on folded paper, wordplay, and Naftolin’s signature use of typography.

The Paris-based collage artist Emmanuel Pierre read Aaron Matz on the subject of satire and sent a buzzing, animated scene of early modern figures, one holding a piece of paper, surrounded by birds, bugs, and sundry objets.

The series art in the issue is by the New York–based illustrator Carly Blumenthal.

One might think, given our recent blizzards and cold snap, the idea of climbing into a tub of freezing cold water is the definition of unappealing. But in the last two years I’ve been seduced by—and convinced of the benefits of—the cold plunge. This newsletter, covering the art and illustrations in the February 12 and February 26 issues, comes courtesy of a few “temperature contrast sessions” I did between closing the two issues at a tiny place on 27th Street, where for an hour the hydrophilic bather can alternate between a 180-degree sauna and a 39-degree ice bath.

The sessions made me think of the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean the night the Titanic sank (28 degrees) and the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845, when 130 sailors vanished on a voyage to the Arctic, three of whom were later found buried on Beechey Island in Canada’s far north. When their bodies were exhumed in 1984, they had been perfectly preserved by the permafrost. Both thoughts have kept me feeling grateful and warm during these gray winter weeks.

The cover of our February 12 issue is a painting by a favorite artist of mine, Nathalie Du Pasquier, a French painter and designer who lives in Milan, where she was one of the founding members of the 1980s Memphis Group. We’ve used paintings of hers to illustrate articles before, but this is her cover debut. When I picked up the book Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, a collaboration between Du Pasquier and the writer Leonard Koren, at Mast Books in the East Village, I flipped through it and made a mental note to try to get her on a cover this year. A week later, when I showed the editors her work and observed that the radicchio felt both wintry and somehow Gertrude Stein–like in its pairing with the staple gun, the vote was unanimous.

For Hermione Lee’s review of Francesca Wade’s biography of Stein, I asked Fanny Blanc for a scene showing Alice B. Toklas and Stein. Blanc wrote that she found Stein’s need for Toklas’s approval touching and that she “wanted to depict them in that moment, Stein nervously awaiting Toklas’s reading of her texts. I tried to maintain a touch of harshness in Stein’s posture.”

We wanted some sort of collage for Aryeh Neier and Gara LaMarche’s investigation of philanthropy in the Trump era, so I wrote to the photographer and designer Michael Schmelling (whose work also featured on our November 23, 2023, cover). The artist John Brooks took on a portrait of Jane DeLynn for Regina Marler’s review of the reissue of her autobiographical novel In Thrall; afterward he wrote to me: “It might be my favorite amongst the [portraits] I’ve done for you. There are not so many images of her, but I found this on her own Facebook page!”

For Adam Kirsch’s essay about Gabriele Tergit’s 1951 novel Effingers, I asked the Berlin-based illustrator Sophia Martineck to draw Tergit. In her consistently thoughtful style, Martineck showed Tergit, as she wrote to me, “in London with a German newspaper, a Buddenbrooks book and an Anne Frank book under her arm. And with her suitcase as a symbol for her life in exile / being a refugee. The roses stand for the mentioned book she wrote on flowers and gardens.”

The designer Paul Sahre cleverly illustrated Laurence Tribe’s review of Jill Lepore’s new book about the Constitution, We the People, by creating an ASCII version of the Constitution.

The series art in the issue, titled Improvisations in Ink, is by the cartoonist Harry Bliss. “You have no idea what a treat this is for me,” he wrote of doing the abstract work. “I could do this all night.”

The cover of the February 26 issue was intended as a nod to Ian Tattersall’s essay about the diversity of nature, but the ink painting of a big black flower (titled Flor negra), done by the Spanish artist Jesús Cisneros in a 2022 sketchbook, wound up suiting a number of darker subjects inside the issue: Fintan O’Toole’s essay about the murders in Minneapolis, Ben Rhodes on McNamara and Vietnam, Oscar Lopez on coercive adoptions of Guatemalan and El Salvadoran children, and Ben Tarnoff’s essay eulogizing the philosopher Asad Haider. I was eager to use the image—so large and graphic—on the cover, and Cisneros sent a crisp new scan.

O’Toole’s essay about the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers was filed a few days before the issue shipped, and after reading it, O’Toole’s editor specifically requested John Brooks’s realistic, strong style. Brooks was catching a flight the next morning, but he stayed up late drawing the pair. He later posted the work to Instagram and wrote, “With the fulfillment of this assignment, I felt less like I was doing my job as an artist and more like I was doing my job, in some small way, as an American citizen.”

Edel Rodriguez drew a banker in a whirlpool for Trevor Jackson’s essay about the Fed and central banks. Vivienne Flesher sent no fewer than twelve gorgeous versions of Toni Morrison for Namwali Serpell’s essay about Morrison’s humor and darkness. It was hard to pick one.

Ben Tarnoff wrote about his friend Asad Haider, a philosopher and theorist of “millennial socialism” who died, age thirty-eight, in Toronto, where he taught at York University. Though the designer Oliver Munday is better known for graphic collage work, he’s also done good portraits, so we asked him for one of Haider. In addition to designing and illustrating, Munday also writes, and a collection of his short fiction, Head of Household, was published yesterday by Simon and Schuster.

For Vivian Gornick’s review of Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy, I asked Ciara Quilty-Harper for one of her tender portraits. She sent us four sketches, but the one invoking the figure of Roy’s mother won out. After reading Larry Rohter’s essay about the Chilean writer José Donoso, I looked up photos of Donoso. His face made me think of Andrea Ventura. Ventura was available and sent a sketchy bearded likeness for the final, its underdone style giving Donoso an animated quality.

One of our assistant editors found Baby (2020), a painting by José Mario Dellow, a Guatemalan artist who was also adopted, to run alongside Oscar Lopez’s essay about the adoption industry in Guatemala and El Salvador.

The series art in the issue, Hard to Soft, is by the theater poster artist and illustrator James McMullan.

The final art newsletter of 2025 covers the art and illustrations in the Review’s Holiday Issue and has a more practical purpose than previous newsletters: I’ve been inundated with gift guides for things I can’t afford, so I’ve decided to make my own guide. Herewith, twelve tried-and-true gifts that I’ll be giving or have already given to my loved ones, alongside my director’s commentary on the art from the magazine.

Gift Suggestion No. 1: A subscription to The New York Review of Books, of course! It’s the perfect gift for the reader, student, thinker, commuter, outraged relative, protest marcher, or protest-too-mucher in your life. If you buy now you can get our holiday rate: $45 for a year of the Review. And when you give this gift you will receive a gift of your own from us—a free David Levine 2026 Calendar.

The cover to our Holiday Issue was drawn and hand-lettered by the brilliant printmaker and graphic novelist David Sandlin, whose visceral, apocalyptic work always seems to pass through a glass darkly. I’ve known Sandlin for decades and thought his style would be a nice contrast to what can often be a saccharine season. He drew a dinner party in a frozen, moonlit grotto, with the cover lines written on ice floes. When I asked him where the idea came from, he said, “I make a silk-screened holiday card each year for my friends and family. I love the cool yellows and blues of the winter landscape, especially the colors of the moon and snow, so I often use that palette. I’ve also been working on a large-format silk-screened artist’s book about the climate crisis, so extreme weather conditions are at the front of my imagination right now. I wanted it to look fun, with a hint of impending doom.” His holiday card this year is an adaptation of our cover. “Done and done!” he wrote.

Gift Suggestion No. 2: This one is seasonal. For the drivers and car owners in your life, nothing beats a fleece steering wheel cover. It’s hard to be chic when driving in the winter, so you might as well be cozy and slightly ridiculous-looking on cold mornings.

The issue opens with a review by Frances Wilson of Patricia Lockwood’s latest book, Will There Ever Be Another You. I wrote to Camille Deschiens, a first-time illustrator for us, to see if she could take the assignment. She depicted Lockwood with her eyes closed in a dreamy, textured landscape. I hope Deschiens will do more work for us in the new year.

Gift Suggestion No. 3: I’ve had a vegetable chopper for about fifteen years, and I love it. A few years ago I upgraded from plastic to stainless steel, and I haven’t looked back. As Fleetwood Mac might say, they make onions fun.

A pair of Joe Brainard panels illustrates Lucy Sante’s review of The Complete C Comics, and a handsome Lorenzo Gritti portrait of the Trinidadian Torontonian novelist Harold Sonny Ladoo sits atop Colin Grant’s review of Ladoo’s Yesterdays (1972), recently republished by Toronto’s Coach House Press.

Gift Suggestion No. 4: A thirty-inch-long hot water bottle. It’s like a weighted blanket, fake pet, and rubber scarf in one. Good for chilly afternoons or chilly bedding. In Italy they sometimes call hot water bottles “mezzo-marito,” which means “half-husband.”

When I read Susan Tallman’s essay about the trouble with ethnology collections at museums, I immediately thought of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the raided and crated ark is wheeled into an enormous warehouse among thousands of other artifacts, lost again in the stacks. I was happy that Tallman agreed it was a fitting illustration for her essay about colonial looting.

Gift Suggestion No. 5: What I really want for Christmas is reasonable gun control. I’m shaken by the shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach. A charity I like is Everytown, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the United States. A donation to Everytown helps fund their work, which includes lobbying for gun control laws, representing survivors of shootings in court cases, funding support and care work for survivors, and researching and publishing reports on the causes and impacts of gun violence. They also make nice T-shirts.

Paisley Currah’s essay on the recent rise of anti-trans legislation in the United States called for a sensitive image. My inclination was to look at art made by trans artists, and I thought of Pace Taylor, whose work we featured on our October 23 cover. I sent a few of their paintings to the editors of the essay, and after further research we found I AM A WITNESS, a wonderful collage of hands that Taylor began in 2020. It seemed to convey, as one editor said, “a certain kind of bureaucratic compilation/accumulation of paper records.”

Gift Suggestion No. 6: I go sockless in the summer and buy all my socks at hardware stores in the winter. It doesn’t matter what hardware store or what brand of sock. If they weren’t warm enough for construction workers, the store probably wouldn’t carry them.

For Jé Wilson’s review of a documentary and a book about being adrift on the ocean, her editor found a gorgeous Caspar David Friedrich painting, On the Sailing Boat (1818–1820), that contrasts the intimacy of a couple with the expanse of the ocean.

Gift Suggestion No. 7: Gift cards from bookstores. In New York, I like Three Lives, 192 Books, Dashwood Books, Desert Island Comics, and McNally Jackson. In Canada, I like the Drawn and Quarterly bookstore in Montreal, and in Toronto, Type Books, The Monkey’s Paw, and Flying Books. Parnassus in Nashville, Book Soup in LA. Doesn’t matter, books are great gifts and bookstores everywhere need patrons.

In her review of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Death and the Gardener, Francine Prose quotes a passage that mentions “dark-blue tulips.” This made me think of asking the Belgian-born, Berlin-based graphic novelist Olivier Schrauwen for a portrait of Gospodinov, in part because Schrauwen’s palette in his last book, Sunday (reviewed in our May 29 issue by Chris Ware), includes a lot of risograph-printed dark blue.

Gift Suggestion No. 8: A sack of potatoes, a pot of paint, a brush, and a cookie cutter. Make some potato-printed thank you cards or wrapping paper. Easy for all ages.

For John Banville’s essay about Henry James and America, I asked the Montrealer Alain Pilon for a likeness of James, hoping it would be unusual, and he really delivered with a woodcut profile. Yuri Slezkine’s editor found a wonderful Saul Steinberg drawing for his essay about the origins of the idea of “the West.”

Gift Suggestion No. 9: Flippers. They elevate all swimming. In a pool they help improve your form and speed, while in a lake or on the pebbly shore they protect your feet from rocks and slime. Get the short kind you can walk in (serious swimmers call them “zoomers”), not the long, floppy ones.

Reading Pria Anand’s wonderful essay about tuberculosis, my first thought was Edvard Munch’s tender and heartbreaking drawings of his sister, who died of the disease at age fifteen. We chose a ghostly, gauzy profile titled The Sick Child I (1896), which hangs in the MunchMuseet in Oslo.

Gift Suggestion No. 10: Buy a personal ad in The New York Review of Books for the singleton in your life. Since 1970 we’ve been helping readers, writers, and book aficionados meet their matches. A print ad in four consecutive issues costs only $5.35 per word and reaches thousands of like-minded readers.

I wrote to Oliver Munday hoping he’d take on Jed Rakoff’s essay about the dangers of unregulated cryptocurrency. Munday sent a handful of sketches playing with the idea of bank robbers, and we choose a currency-printed balaclava mask.

Gift Suggestion No. 11: Give someone you love a medicine ball. They come in a nice, collegiate brown, but also all sorts of cheerful colors. Due to their weight, they are very fun to watch people unwrap. The ones filled with sand can also be used as ad hoc chairs.

We wanted to find a photo for Andrew O’Hagan’s essay about the Oasis reunion tour, but the usual agency channels turned up predictable images. I’ve been a fan of Julian Broad’s photographs since seeing a portrait he did of Radiohead on tour in Italy in 2000 (Thom Yorke on a grimy sofa, Colin Greenwood and Ed O’Brien standing near what looks like a craft services table). On his website I found contact sheets of some shots he’d taken of the Gallagher brothers at a show in Scotland in the summer of 1995. I wrote to Broad, fingers crossed, and he wrote back, happy to let us use them, and sent a few more from the same concert. We chose three, depicting the brothers as well as a fan, that went perfectly with the spirit of O’Hagan’s piece.

The series art in the issue is by Lisa Naftolin, who recently designed the signage and branding for the wonderful Lower East Side bakery Elbow Bread.

A final gift suggestion: over half the population might appreciate a silicon micturation funnel. It’s excellent for hikers, campers, long-distance drivers, and anyone who hasn’t experienced the freedom provided by a tidy, standing leak. Liberté, égalité, et sororité!

I’m lucky to be able to work with so many talented artists, writers, and editors all year long, and grateful for the readers of my newsletter and of our magazine. Happiest of holidays to all of you, and a happy new year.

Newsletter thirty-eight, covering the art and illustrations in the November 6, November 20, and December 4 issues, comes after I made a brief visit to Toronto, where I attended a House of Anansi Press board meeting and stayed with my brother. The Toronto Blue Jays were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, and like the rest of the city, my brother and I were watching. After he opened a bag of potato chips and poured a glass of wine, I picked up the bag and marveled that the chips were Marmite flavored. I ate one; there was nothing Marmite-like about it, so I looked at the package again. I realized “Cuites à la Marmite” was a translation of “Kettle Cooked.” My brain flooded with memories of the bilingual package designs of my Canadian childhood. French classes were mandatory until ninth grade, but I credit what basic French I retain to the bilingual signage and wrappers that surrounded me growing up. I still think “pâte dentifrice” before “toothpaste” and see “sirop” when I hear “syrup.”

The best packaging, to my eye, is the yellow-and-black designs for the generic, no-name (non nom) products at the No Frills discount supermarkets, owned by the Loblaw company. Their products are branded simply and graphically in Helvetica on a lemon-yellow ground. It’s a giant storewide vocabulary lesson. I asked my brother to take me to the nearest No Frills so I could paint the packages.

The cover of the November 6 issue, Untitled (Human heart), is by the artist Cy Gavin, and we picked it to echo Ben Lerner’s essay about his open-heart surgery. (Inside the issue, Lerner’s memoiristic thoughts about mortality and writing were paired with a diptych of Jason Fulford photographs of hospital oddments.) For two articles on the state of criticism (by Jed Perl, on a critic’s power, and Matthew Aucoin, on music criticism), I asked George Wylesol for a pair of rhyming illustrations. He delivered two quiet, unusual scenes of spectators encountering artwork.

I knew Fulford had photographed medical environments, so after reading Lerner’s essay, I asked him to send me a selection. He sent more than twenty, each in his signature deadpan-absurdist-documentary style, from green scrubs to anatomical models. We picked some institutional sheeting and a wall of diagnostic instruments.

On a visit to Paris, the illustrator and writer Maira Kalman went to the show “Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. She was inspired to paint a scene of Dreyfus in his cell on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, where he was imprisoned for over four years. I’m hopeful this could be the first in a series of paintings inspired by exhibitions.

After reading Peter E. Gordon’s review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s latest book, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, I thought of some Katherine Bradford pieces I’d seen on a recent visit to Canada Gallery, in Tribeca. Looking through her older work, I found a wonderful painting titled, appropriately, Law Makers (2021), which went perfectly with Gordon’s discussion of Appiah’s thoughts on ritual and sociology. Bradford’s show is up at Canada Gallery until December 13.

Wyatt Mason writes about eight collections of Guy Davenport’s letters and essays in a beautiful tribute to the late critic. Davenport was born in South Carolina but lived and died in Lexington, Kentucky, and I wanted a fellow southerner to make his portrait. I thought of the artist and Kentuckian John Brooks, who is also a fan of Davenport’s. He gave us a lovely drawing of the bespectacled writer.

For Francine Prose’s review of the first English translation of Adam and Eve in Paradise, by the nineteenth-century poet and writer Eça de Queirós, I looked up work by the Spanish painter and illustrator Jesús Cisneros. He had done a number of scenes of plants and animals, and a few of a paradisal garden. We chose In the garden, from 2020.

When I was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2018, I flew to London every month, and I found relatively cheap, regular lodging at the Royal Society of Medicine in Marylebone. On my way to my room, I’d pass an enormous painting on the main staircase, Alexander I, Emperor of Russia (1820), by James Northcote, which depicts Alexander I on horseback, rescuing a peasant who appears to have drowned.

After I read Nitin K. Ahuja’s piece about the “gray zone” between life and death, I remembered the painting, which has since been removed from the Royal Society and is now up for auction at Christie’s (estimate: £10,000–£15,000). The painting’s plaque reads: “H.I.M. Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias: The Emperor, seeing the apparently lifeless body of a peasant which had been dragged from the River Wilna, dismounted from his horse, and after more than three hours’ constant personal efforts, succeeded in restoring the man to life. For this Act the Gold Medal of the Royal Humane Society was rewarded to H.I.M. in 1806.”

Alexander I, Emperor of Russia also makes an appearance in a short story of mine, published last year in The Yale Review.

Also in the November 6 issue, Hillary Kelly considers the novelist and short story writer Tessa Hadley. I hoped Adrian Tomine might make a good portrait, despite the fact that he’s often been unavailable recently, busy as he is drawing New Yorker covers and making a film adaptation of his comic Shortcomings. To my surprise, he said yes and delivered a striking profile portrait of the British writer.

Darryl Pinckney reviewed Nicholas Boggs’s new biography of James Baldwin, and we chose a bright Beauford Delaney portrait from 1965 to go with it. It was initially hard to track down permissions to reprint the painting, so I wrote to Boggs for help, running the risk that he might suspect we were covering his book. He came through with a contact for Delaney’s estate, and I was relieved he didn’t ask any questions.

The series art for the issue, Danse de tilleul (Linden Dance) (2025), is by Bénédicte Thoraval.

The cover of the November 20 issue is by the Japanese painter Hiroki Kawanabe, whose work we’ve run alongside several essays in the past. His painting After the Rain (2025) was perfect for late autumn’s wet and chilly weather.

It’s always helpful when our artists and illustrators are close readers of the Review, or fans of our contributors. The British illustrator Paul Davis has told me a number of times how much he admires Fintan O’Toole—his own irate, irreverent style seems to match O’Toole’s voice—so I often try to pair the two. Davis’s deadpan dying donkey was a nice fit with O’Toole’s review of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days.

Carly Blumenthal’s drawing of Kate Riley, for Joanna Biggs’s review of Riley’s recent novel Ruth, incorporated elements from Biggs’s trenchant description of the novel’s setting: “the sort of MAHA paradise that Americans love to dream about right now, where yogurt is made from scratch, women treasure their floral dresses, and children play with newts rather than watch screens.”

Looking for images and ideas for Anne Diebel’s essay about fertility and freezing eggs, I turned to the artist Emma Kohlmann. One of her watercolors, of a moonlike face overlayed with a female figure, suggested the lunar cycle and dreams, two big aspects of the reproductive journey.

For Linda Kinstler’s review of two books about nation-states and sovereignty, the designer Paul Sahre sent a sketch of state-shaped holes in the ground, but upon making the final art he complained that “every defunct country looks like a hole in the ground!” I had to agree, but I still liked the way it looked. He solved our problem by numbering and labeling the holes.

The series art in the issue, Stones and Shells (2025), is by Céline Aziza Kaldas Anderson.

The cover of our December 4 issue, Anemone Flowered Japanese Chrysanthemum’s (2025), is by the French illustrator Jochen Gerner. Gerner drew some of the Review’s very first series art after our redesign in 2022, and he has illustrated or provided art for a number of essays over the past three years. I’ve tried a few times to get his work on the cover, so I was very happy when the editors agreed on this piece.

The designer and art director Kelly Blair gave us a graphic play on webs and clicks for James Gleick’s essay about the decay of the World Wide Web and Internet culture. I recently read some of Vigdis Hjorth’s novels and became a huge fan (and I was over budget for my illustration quota), so I was happy to pinch-hit and painted the Norwegian writer myself for Ursula Lindsey’s review of three of her books.

Michael Gorra reviews Susan Cheever’s latest memoir, When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever, and I asked the Berlin-born, Paris-based illustrator Simone Goder for a double portrait of father and daughter Cheever. For Susan Neiman’s review of David Rieff’s book Desire and Fate, the designer Matt Dorfman took the idea of “woke” literally, submitting us sketches of eyes, open and shut. We chose one venetian-blinded version, alternating open and shut in the colors of the American flag.

I read Adam Kirsch’s review of Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben and thought that Agamben’s fellow Italian Andrea Ventura might make a good portrait. Little did I know, Ventura was in Rome, and a friend of his happened to be having lunch with Agamben the next day. He got his friend to take a picture of Agamben to use as reference. Andrea sent the photo, then two wonderful drawings. I think this sets a record for most freshly executed portrait. For Anthony Domestico’s review of a biography of the poet Amy Clampitt, Georgie McAusland offered us a choice of backdrops, either Unicorn Tapestry–esque flowers or foggy Maine coast. We went with the coast, and McAusland delivered a deeply haunting likeness.

The issue concludes with Zephyr Teachout’s review of two books about multilevel marketing schemes and consumer and workplace policy. I asked the Antwerp-based Fien Jorissen to illustrate it. She explained her sketch thus: “I tried to represent the pyramid structure with the schemes through multiple panels, focusing on subtle gestures and the sense of tragedy within the system. I also wanted to explore a way to go beyond just depicting multilevel marketing, using the hang-gliding figure as a kind of meta-narrator, reflecting on the system itself, where the pyramid becomes part of the landscape and the sun takes the form of a dollar.” Thoughtful work.

The series art in the issue, Connectivity (2025), is by Lucy Yu, who keeps an impressive sketchbook while simultaneously owning and operating the wonderful Chinatown bookstore Yu & Me Books, described as New York’s first queer Asian American bookstore/bar/café.

It’s the last week of summer, and our thirty-sixth art newsletter comes via the bookcase of a summer rental in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where my daughter and I stayed as guests. The books on the shelves, mostly hardcovers, were all at least twenty-five years old, and I was struck by how many of them employed serif fonts on their jackets. So I painted them.

Our Fall Books Issue is one of the four issues each year for which we commission an illustrator to design and letter the cover. For this one, though, I asked a graphic designer: Matt Willey, who previously worked on the Review’s redesign in 2021. His cover is a tribute to his father, Nick, who was a poet and longtime subscriber to the Review; Willey remembers the magazine being a feature around his father’s study when he was growing up. On the cover, his painted trees were made with the same Rotring inks with which his father drew, and Willey typed out the coverlines using a Smith-Corona Sterling typewriter. (An interview with Matt about his cover will be published on Saturday.)

The issue opens with a review by Trevor Jackson of two books that address the immense challenges that the changing climate will bring to human civilization: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. I thought first of Tom Bachtell and his sharp ink portraits. He gave us a blindfolded planet earth, in fiery orange and red, stumbling amid the four writers.

For Mark O’Connell’s incisive review of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, I thought of George Wylesol, whose clean, flat line could be appropriate. He sent three sketches, all of them cool and admonitory, and we opted for his depiction of a computer desktop displaying both military and marketing imagery.

Two—actually, three—of my favorite artists came together in Lorrie Moore’s review of Miriam Toews’s new memoir. I first read Toews twenty-five years ago in Paul Tough’s early Internet publication Open Letters. It was an online magazine that collected first-person epistolary writing—a sort of bellwether for blogs and then Substack—in the intimate style of This American Life. Toews’s letters were my favorite, a new voice and style I’d never encountered. I’ve read everything she’s written since. I was eager to ask the Bristol-based Harriet Lee-Merrion, who had just finished maternity leave, to make a portrait of Toews. She drew her in a forthright, seated composition. In the second paragraph of Moore’s review, she writes about Toews’s “bright, precise voice of indignation…distilled from ‘bone-deep rage’”—a perfect description that would have sold me on the book if I hadn’t already planned on buying it.

Linda Greenhouse writes about four books in her essay covering the millennia-long history of abortion. The Massachusetts-based artist Emma Kohlmann often paints women who look as though they are grappling with the weight of history, and I thought that her 2021 painting Caged Nightmare might illustrate a point Greenhouse makes at the end of the essay that restricting abortion confines women as a class. Kohlmann sent a hi-res picture of her painting in the busy moments before she opened her solo show at Silke Lindner gallery in New York City, which is up until October 4.

When I looked up photos of Michael Lentz, who wrote Schattenfroh: A Requiem, which Anahid Nersessian reviews, I thought that Harry Bliss might make a good portrait.Bliss is best known for his dog cartoons, but back in April he drew Charles Ferdinand Ramuz for us, and I wanted to see what he’d do with another hard-nosed writer. He turned in, four days ahead of deadline, a tender profile of Lentz set against the bombed-out town of Düren.

Grant Shaffer e-mailed me five slightly different portraits of Patrick Modiano for Ruth Margalit’s review of the French writer’s newly translated novel Ballerina. I sent my favorites to the editors, who picked a sharpish Modiano, gentle but glaring.

I’d used up my commissioning budget before I got to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay about free speech, so I spent a few days looking for fine art that didn’t involve the usual visual metaphors of megaphones and speech bubbles. The editors rejected everything I sent. I finally found, buried in Julien Posture’s Instagram feed, an unpublished image that got the green light. When I got hold of Posture, he couldn’t find the hi-res file in his hard drive, explaining that the image was “old and unfortunately predates my learning of good archival practice.” Then he added, “If you want, I can whip up a new version quickly.” I told him it was a deal.

The series art, titled “Free Oscillation,” is by Megan Barron, an artist, writer, and volunteer firefighter and EMT who lives two cottages away from where my kid and I spend part of the summer in the North Fork community on Long Island.

Our thirty-fourth art newsletter comes via The New York Review’s editorial group chat, where some of our staffers have recently been posting photos of their pets in the summer heat. I love drawing cats, and I find a lethargic cat lying supine to be a beautiful thing. Herewith, please find a gallery of our beloved, overheated cats.

I initially planned on putting a swimmer of some kind on the cover of our July 24 issue, as we did for one of the summertime issues last year, but I threw Keiji Ito’s Five Tones Jelly (2021), a painting of what looks like Devils Tower if it were made out of green Jell-O, into the mix, and the editors loved it. Something about its uncanniness seemed to nod to James Gleick’s essay about artificial intelligence, Casey A. Williams’s essay about Kohei Saito’s degrowth philosophies, and the more general news that Kraft Heinz is discontinuing the use of artificial dye in its green Jell-O. When I contacted Ito, he explained that the painting’s title is a reference to the five-tone melody that the aliens play in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Jarrett Earnest’s essay about the Jack Whitten retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was an opportunity to publish some of Whitten’s groundbreaking paintings, and for Anahid Nersessian’s review of Service, the debut novel by John Tottenham, the Amsterdam-based artist Michelle Mildenberg delivered an appropriately uncomfortable-looking portrait of Tottenham as a beleaguered bookstore clerk.

I was excited to work with Sarah Böttcher again, as her last portrait for us, in 2023, had been a wonderful rendition of Thomas Brussig. I asked her to draw the Brothers Grimm for Regina Marler’s review of a new biography of the famous folklorists. Böttcher turned in a creeping and creepy double portrait of the siblings, surrounded by flora, fauna, and, as Marler describes it, “the black soil of the German forest.”

I loved Michelle Nijhuis’s essay about conservation and had been looking for the opportunity to assign Fanny Blanc something other than a portrait. She sent a great drawing of a family in a wonderful zoo-cum-museum landscape.

The Berlin-based illustrator Laura Breiling is adept at stuffing ideas into her portraits so she was a natural commission for Casey A. Williams’s essay on the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito and his books about how to respond to the climate crisis. She perched a little Karl Marx on Saito’s shoulder and in the background drew Prometheus holding a banana as, she told me, “a sign for abundance in the industrial wasteland.”

We found a painting of the controversial art collector Albert C. Barnes by one of my favorite painters (of swimmers) Giorgio de Chirico, to accompany Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s review of two books on Barnes’s life and his eponymous museum.

Simone Goder took on a portrait of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti for Lola Seaton’s review of her Alphabetical Diaries. I didn’t tell Goder that Heti is one of my oldest friends until the second round of edits, as I encouraged her to hew a little closer to Heti’s more recent appearance. Fortunately, instead of being annoyed by my nitpicking, Goder wrote, “thank you for trusting me with your friend!” and made a few deft changes.

We paired The Maths Lesson, a Julie Cockburn painting of a child whose head has been broken up into triangular fractals, with James Gleick’s essay on the problems with AI. I’d thought for a while that Cockburn’s eerie paintings might fit well into our magazine and was glad that she saw the synchronicity too. The series art in the issue, titled Bouquet Drawings, is by Jared Nangle, an illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist.

My own cat, Biscuit, is surviving the summer by sprawling on towels, eating fish skins, and recently enjoyed the Fourth of July fireworks tucked into the armpits of my daughter’s hoodie.

A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s March 13 and March 27 issues.

This newsletter comes to you while I’m watching Thunder on the Hill, part of the “Douglas Sirk Noir” series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. A convicted murderer, bickering nurses and nuns, a risky childbirth, a sadistic composer, and a flood all feature in this appealingly gloomy 1951 movie. I like painting black and white film stills, so Sirk’s high-contrast drama was excellent material.

The cover for the magazine’s March 13 issue features a 2018 painting by the Canadian artist Kim Dorland. I was looking for something that might reference the themes of fires, imperialism, and reflection that thread through the issue’s editorial lineup, and after several rounds of discussion and debate we landed on a figure standing before the Northern Lights. Inside, after two long-lost Caravaggio paintings illustrating Ingrid Rowland’s essay about the Renaissance great, a painting of palm trees foregrounding a fiery sky—by the Ithaca, New York–based painter Leslie Brack—opens Martin Filler’s article about the devastation wrought by the wildfires in Los Angeles this January.

James Walton reviews Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, for which the Brazil-born illustrator Laura Lannes made a handsome seated portrait. For an essay by Celia Paul about self-portraiture, excerpted from her new book, Celia Paul: Works, we chose a watercolor study she made of herself at age twenty-three and a painting of the BT Tower as seen from her London apartment.

Maya Chessman drew a somber Anthony Hecht for Mark Ford’s review of the poet’s collected work alongside a new biography. The series art in the issue is by designer and illustrator Mike McQuade, who I met through Corin Hewitt, another series contributor.

In my three years at the Review, I haven’t featured the same artist more than once on the cover. I broke that streak for the March 27 issue after I read Sally Rooney’s wonderful essay about the snooker champion Ronnie O’ Sullivan. The Dutch artist Sigrid Calon, whose work last appeared on our January 19, 2023, cover, makes graphic pattens and compositions, which felt like an appropriate abstraction of a ball’s trajectory on a billiards baize.

For Laura Marsh on the state of attention and distraction, I thought of Fien Jorissen’s multipaneled work. She was available and turned around a detailed and exploded single-panel piece. She explained that she “wanted to create a busy illustration with fragmented pieces that show the mind in a distracted world. However, by using a single-panel illustration as a background, I tried to maintain clarity.” In an unintentional contrast with Jorissen’s figure at a desk, George Wylesolgave us a glowing oculus in place of a computer to illustrate Ben Tarnoff’s essay on the history of artificial intelligence.

Yann Kebbi seemed like the right person to ask for a portrait of Ronald Reagan, and his ballpoint-pen rendering suited Jacob Weisberg’s review of Max Boot’s biography of the former president. As Kebbi wrote to me, “It has a weirdness, but I like it.” The Berlin-based illustrator Laura Breiling manages to gracefully layer a lot of information into her illustrations, so when I read Catherine Nicholson’s essay about the many lives of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I wondered what Breiling might do with it. Her Milton, she explained, is “made of marble with a few fractures, which symbolize his crumbling godlike image.” She sent two final drafts to choose between, either a blond or a brunette Milton, and I picked the blond.

Oliver Munday made a bright illustration of a syringe for David Oshinsky’s essay on RNA, DNA, and vaccines, and Grant Shaffer painted a pensive Ford Madox Ford in a palette-like composition for Michael Dirda’s review of Max Saunders’s new biography of the early-twentieth-century English novelist.

Our editor in chief, Emily Greenhouse, suggested a Jacqueline de Jong painting for Rooney’s essay on snooker. Assistant editor Sam Needleman had written about De Jong and her billiards paintings for the NYR Online in April 2024, and we found a few pieces that seemed a perfect fit. We went with Gitane, coup de force, from 1978. Alette Fleischer at the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation, who helped us secure the image, wrote to tell us that “Ronnie O’Sullivan is my favorite snooker player!”

The series art in the issue, What Remains, is by Natàlia Pàmies, a young illustrator based in Barcelona and Toronto, whose work I was introduced to by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti.

I look up Douglas Sirk when the movie ends and read about his life before he moved to the United States. A leftist artist in Nazi Germany, he divorced his first wife, who joined the Nazi Party and, after Sirk married Hilde Jary, a Jewish actress, his first wife legally barred him from ever seeing his only child. After Sirk and Jary fled Germany in 1937, his son was conscripted into the German army and killed, age eighteen, on the eastern front in 1944. Thunder on the Hill concludes with the wrongfully accused woman exonerated, the baby’s health renewed, and the rains letting up. A typical Hollywood ending, but a relief, nonetheless.

A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s February 13 and February 27 issues.

Some mornings, after I’ve dropped my daughter off at school, I swim laps at my local YMCA. I do about a mile, enough to get my heart rate up, to ruminate on all the big and little concerns, to stretch my limbs and lungs and hamstrings, and, when I’m kicking with a kickboard, to look at the other swimmers. Most of them are elderly Chinese women; most of them wear pink swim caps, which I find cheering. This art newsletter comes post-swim, midwinter.

The painting on the cover of our February 13 issue, Danseurs du crépuscule (2018), is from a series by the French artist Didier Viodé. I’d seen Viodé’s work on the online art platform “It’s Nice That” a few years ago—his athletes, figures, portraits, and self-portraits are unusually vigorous—and I was inspired to look him up again after reading Blair McClendon’s essay about the wondrous Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney. To my delight, Viodé had a number of watercolors of Black dancers. We chose a particularly energetic one.

The Netherlands-based illustrator Hanneke Rozemuller—whose wonderful, trippy drawings remind me of the work of Push Pin Studios, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast’s design collective that once occupied our office building—made a portrait of Colm Tóibín for Giles Harvey’s review of Tóibín’s latest novel, Long Island.

Jessica Riskin’s essay on determinism immediately made me think of Jochen Gerner, whose work often seems to be “thinking aloud.” He made an attractive diagram of a wind-up free-will toy. For Nicole Flattery’s review of Halle Butler’s novel The House of Self-Worth, I asked Leah Reena Goren, not realizing that she lived in fire-ravaged Altadena, Los Angeles. To my surprise, she took the assignment, despite having evacuated her home. I offered her an extension on the usual deadline, but, professional as ever, she delivered a portrait of Butler with houseplant, on time.

I met the artist Andrea Ventura for coffee and asked him to paint Charles de Gaulle for Robert O. Paxton’s review of de Gaulle’s memoirs. He gave us a distinguished DeGaulle en kepi.

Anna Higgie drew a beautiful group portrait of Boris Chicherin, Vasily Maklakov, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Timofei Granovsky, and Pavel Miliukov for Gary Saul Morson’s essay about the history of Russian liberalism. Jason Kernevitch, who is part of the design firm The Heads of State, drew a demented economist for Caitlin Zaloom’s essay about the sometimes inefficient or nonsensical policies that economic thinking can produce.

The series art in the issue was done by the artist Margaux Williamson, who was in town for a show of her work at James Cohan Gallery.

Our February 27 issue featured the painting Man (2020), by the German artist Friedemann Heckel, on the cover. We met to talk about the cover a few days after President Trump’s inauguration, and the subject—a dejected, rumpled man on a train, backdropped by a bleak landscape—seemed appropriate to the moment. I’d seen Heckel’s work one rainy afternoon in January, at Galerie Thomas Fischer in Berlin, and he just closed a show at Schwartzman& in Chelsea.

After reading James Gleick on time and futurology, I remembered Jason Fulford’s 2013 photobook, Hotel Oracle, about the future of the cosmos. I sent Fulford a draft of Gleick’s essay and he e-mailed back, “I like this piece,” and sent a link to fifty-seven photos. We narrowed them down to four. Fulford’s new book, Lots of Lots, is out now from MACK Books.

Gaby Wood, a journalist, printmaker, and the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, made another etching for us, this time of Diana Athill, for Vivian Gornick’s review of Athill’s 1962 book Instead of a Letter. Gaby made a number of different versions, and we settled on one of Athill sitting in a green armchair, inspired by the composition of a painting Vanessa Bell did of her sister, Virginia Woolf. Wood wrote: “I struggled with the likeness in this portrait. It was interesting to think about the features that made Athill recognizable but after a while I went for character—stately demeanor, amused expression—over exactitude.” Paul Sahre gave us more green for Fred Kaplan’s essay about Silicon Valley’s work in the military industry, refiguring the classic plastic army figurine as an iPad-holding, takeout-coffee-gripping tech worker.

I asked Simone Goder for a portrait of Charles Baxter for Sigrid Nunez’s review of his new novel, Blood Test. Alain Pilon drew a tousled, bespectacled Markus Werner for Michael Hofmann’s essay about the disheveled Swiss writer’s recently reissued novel The Frog in the Throat. The artist and illustrator Carly Blumenthal had e-mailed me last fall with examples of her delicate work. A chance to commission her came up with Irina Dumitrescu’s essay about the Albanian writer Lea Ypi and her memoir about growing up under communism, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.

With only one authenticated photograph of the poet Emily Dickinson in existence, I knew Hugo Guinness could make a striking portrait based on this minimal reference material. His woodcut is just off enough to reanimate our collective image of the poet, for Christopher Benfey’s essay about The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

I found a drawing by the artist and jeweler Kaye Blegvad for Anna Louie Sussman’s essay about the state of contemporary sex. I thought Blegvad’s dichromatic bed, accessorized by loose chains, contained at least three or four metaphors for sexual intimacy and its future.

In what I hope might become a recurring feature of graphic conversations, the cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco contributed an original comic, “Never Again and Again,” “drawing themselves into the Gaza Strip.” The pair turned in their pages just before the ceasefire was announced, and in response they quickly adjusted the panels.

The series art in this issue is by Laura Lannes.

When I get out of the pool on these freezing mornings, I shower and put my clothes on beside the mostly Chinese-speaking strangers. I wonder, with some dread, how our worlds might collide and change, randomly and suddenly, at any given moment or executive order.

When I was a kid, at bedtime my dad would tell my brother and me to go “up the wooden hill to see the blanket show.” Ever since then I have had a strong affection for blankets: I have a large blanket collection, and this is now my second newsletter involving blankets.

Due to my family’s casual adherence to primogeniture, I, two years younger than my brother, didn’t inherit much from my paternal grandmother. My brother got the good stuff. But I did get one ring and one blanket she had knit: an afghan made from scraps of wool. The colors and their random combinations make up a palette that feels like home to me; it evokes Canada in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve had it for years and unfold it when I need ideas for color.

The London-based artist Reed Wilson made the painting on our October 9 cover: daylight filtering through the holes of a colander. Wilson paints still lifes of domestic tools—ramekins, dish towels, bottles—and when I read Leslie Chang’s essay on Chinese food and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s on domestic work, I thought of Wilson. The painting is titled Tuccia’s Colander, “after Tuccia the Vestal Virgin,” Wilson wrote to me when I asked. “[She] had to prove her ‘purity’ by carrying water in a sieve and not spilling a drop. I thought she tricked everyone by dipping the sieve in animal fat and then plunging it into cold water, which filled the holes, but I can’t find anything about that online!”

The issue starts with an essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg covering five books about octopus intelligence. I asked the ink maker Jason Logan to paint one octopus, and he painted eight. We chose a particularly beautiful one. I wanted an updated Charlotte Brontë for Frances Wilson’s review of a new biography by Graham Watson, so I asked Alain Pilon. He gave her blue eyes but changed them a few hours before the review shipped when an editor found a couple of accounts describing her eyes as “hazel.”

I’ve previously only commissioned portraits from the Norwich-based artist Maya Chessman, but after reading Chang’s thoughtful disquisition on Chinese cuisine I thought of Chessman’s illustrations of flora and fauna. She drew some wonderful hairy crabs, soybeans, mushrooms, and peppers in a basket, in the rain. John Broadley was a natural fit for Gregory Hays on three books about the Caesars. True to form, Broadley gave us a dramatic Caesar based on the Aldobrandini Tazze, a set of twelve silver standing cups that depict the lives of the Roman rulers.

The Berlin-based Romy Blümel drew Marguerite Young for David Schurman Wallace’s review of two recent reissues, of one of Young’s novels and her collected poems. Blümel was inspired by a description by Charles Ruas, from his 1977 interview with her in the Paris Review: “a colorful presence, strolling nonchalantly down Bleecker Street in her long crimson dresses, with a gold embroidered vest, her black Polish nursemaid boots worn with pink stockings, toes peeking through, and a floor-length red woolen cape thrown over her shoulder.”

The cover of the October 23 issue is a painting by the Portland-based artist Pace Taylor. I’d seen their work through Nationale, a great gallery and bookshop in Portland that also represents Carson Ellis, who drew the cover for our April 21, 2022, issue.

The painting I wanted was titled something you said. Taylor pointed out that it’s three years old, so she sent us a handful of gorgeous more recent paintings, but the editors kept coming back to the first one. I liked how it echoed Jacob Weisberg’s article about duplicity on social media and Elaine Blair’s about modern Russian feminism.

I’d seen Taryn Simon’s installation Kleroterian, a sculpture and selection of photos about elections and the madness of the 2024 American presidential campaigns, at Gagosian in March. I loved the photograph Miss Sassy, Springfield Ohio (2024), which is a portrait of the cat who had allegedly been eaten by Haitian migrants, before it was found alive and well in her owner’s basement. The photograph was an apt pairing with Weisberg’s essay on how disinformation spreads through social media algorithms.

There are so few pictures of Thomas Pynchon on- or offline. This narrowed the French illustrator Yann Kebbi’s pool of references for the portrait I commissioned to go with Andrew Katzenstein’s review of Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket. Kebbi managed, in the end, to give us a great drawing of Pynchon in his youth.

For Christopher Tayler’s review of the Nobel Prize–winning Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium, I asked the Polish-born, London-based illustrator Maria-Ines Gul, who drew the cover of our Spring Books issue earlier this year. She gave us a bold, brushy likeness of Tokarczuk. And for Ange Mlinko’s review of two new poetry collections, by Peter Balakian and Angie Estes, I asked the LA-based illustrator Leah Reena Goren for two more of the watercolor portraits that she does so well. The issue ends with Michelle Mildenberg’s painting of the Icelandic writer Sjón for Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s review of Red Milk, his latest novel.

This post is part of our ongoing series “The Art Newsletter,” written and illustrated by the Review’s Art Editor, Leanne Shapton. Subscribe below.