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.
A great list. I hope you get what you wish for.