What could be better than curling up with a new book? Curling up with a new art book, of course. From weighty tomes delving into the iconic Surrealist manifestos to a raucous jaunt through a New York It Girl’s heyday, there’s no shortage of options to choose from. We’ve combed through the galleys to find the best of what’s new and worth your while.

STUFF: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos by Kim Hastreiter

Cover of Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos by Kim Hastreiter. Courtesy of Damiani.

Kim Hastreiter is the co-founder of Paper magazine, the downtown New York cultural bible. During her tenure, she became known not just as a forecaster of what was cool in fashion and art, but as a cheerleader for it. If something wasn’t worth celebrating, why bother covering it?

It’s often said that someone’s life is their art, and that couldn’t be truer for Hastreiter. Since her art school days, she has been a Zelig-like presence at the heart of every bohemian zeitgeist in her vicinity. But all the while, what many assumed was pack-ratting was curation. Stuff is her visual memoir, packed with the fabulous receipts to prove it.

Her arrival in New York could be straight out of a Lou Reed song: she drove cross-country with her bestie, the drag queen Joey Arias. She connected Vivienne Westwood to a pre-fame Keith Haring for a 1981 collaboration (Hastreiter was a habituée of Club 57) and, of course, saved some ultra-rare pieces—photographed here alongside her college graduation outfit, her wardrobe from 1977–1981, and even her collection of skateboard decks. Scattered throughout are unexpected souvenirs, like a Panasonic Senior Partner portable computer she found near the West Side Highway in 1986 and has kept in her closet ever since.

Hastreiter is so art world entrenched that her book release came with its own self-curated group show, “My Amazing Friends” at Deitch Projects, featuring intimates such as David Wojnorowicz, Kembra Pfahler, and Marilyn Minter, as well as her own impressive geometric abstractions.

Visually arresting, Stuff is more than a personal archive—it’s a self-portrait through objects and acerbic text that tells a much bigger cultural narrative.

—William Van Meter

The Violet Hour by James Cahill

Cover of James Cahill’s The Violet Hour (2025). Courtesy of Hachette.

It isn’t exactly hard to satirize the art world, but it is always fun. James Cahil, author of the well-received debut Tiepolo Blue, plants us right within the thrum of London’s busy contemporary art market, where we meet flashy art collector Leo Goffman, underdog art dealer Lorna Bedord, villainous mega-gallerist Claude Berlins, and in demand abstract painter Thomas Haller. The latter subverts no stereotypes about artists in being moody and elusive yet impressively lascivious. Inevitably, what follows are displays of ego, extravagance, artifice, and avarice that might seem implausible to an art world outsider but, to insiders, signal business as usual. All this is set against such classic haunts as yet another gallery opening and, of course, the Venice Biennale. At the center of it all, a murder mystery… Why has Berlins’ associate director toppled from the top of a Victorian water tower?

—Jo Lawson-Tancred

Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking by Larry Fink

Cover of Larry Fink: Hands On / A Passionate Life of Looking. Courtesy of powerHouse Books.

The book provides an intimate look into Fink’s life, with essays from those who knew him best, including photographer Stephen Shore, former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, art director and educator Yolanda Cuomo, and Martha Posner, Fink’s widow and a celebrated sculptor. 

Whether it be capturing Andy Warhol, President Barack Obama, Jay-Z, or friends and neighbors around Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, Fink’s work had a dynamic range unlike any other photographer. Playful, impromptu, sensual, surreal, beautiful, ugly, and mysterious… the list of descriptors goes on. “He had this ability to connect,” powerHouse Books Publisher Daniel Power told Wallpaper. In his essay in the book, Power added: “There is nothing I could have changed or would want to change. This is the book you have now in your hands: it is the most perfect photo book I have ever done.” 

There has never been and will never be a photographer like Larry Fink and this superb collection of images and essays does justice with reflecting that very sentiment. 

—Kenneth Bachor

What You Make of Me by Sophie Madeline Dess

Cover of Sophe Madeline Dess, What You Make of Me (2025). Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

As someone who receives approximately one gallery press release in my inbox per second, I was impressed that reading a book in the format of one could totally enchant me.

Sophie Madeline Dess’s debut novel What You Make of Me sees artist Ava prompted with the task of writing a release for her first solo show, and takes the assignment to tell a compelling story of a sibling relationship bonded by trauma, art, and their charmingly alien approach to socializing in New York City. The writing in What You Make of Me sold me on the story: it is unmooring, odd, and thoroughly engaging.

Though there is no magical element to the book (it is very much set in the contemporary downtown art world in New York City), there is a fantastical edge to how Ava’s narration sees being a young, promising artist. Throughout the book, asterisks pock loaded moments in the telling of her life, which signal when she has made that moment into an artwork in her solo show. It’s evocative and surprising, and made me wish I could go to the opening. Comms managers at galleries, take note!

—Annie Armstrong

Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi

Cover of Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi, Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso (2025). Courtesy of Yale University Press.

Writers Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi, the latter a senior curator at Gagosian London, took a deep dive into the life of Cubist art collector, art historian, and critic Douglas Cooper, who is regarded as one of the most prominent, if divisive, figures in the 20th-century art world. Art star David Hockney penned the forward.

Cooper, who was born into a wealthy family in 1911, assembled a great collection of artworks by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and Picasso in the 1930s. Later on, he organized major exhibitions, including one with Gary Tinterow on Cubism that was held at the Tate in 1983.

The writers’ extensive research yields fresh insight into Cooper’s life and achievements, including his financing of London’s Mayor Gallery during the 1930s and his friendships with artists like Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, and Joan Miró.

During WWII, he served as an ambulance driver, and later, as a senior Monuments Man. Later in life, he moved to a chateau in the South of France, taking his storied collection with him. The biography will also serve as a definitive account of Cooper’s dealing, curating, and art writing.

—Eileen Kinsella

We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance, and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare

Cover of Lanre Bakare, We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain (2025). Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

Within a broader account of Black cultural history outside of London during Thatcher-era Britain, We Were There recounts the early days of the Black British Arts Movement in the 1980s. The author, Guardian arts and culture correspondent Lanre Bakare, spotlights one foundational event: the BLK Art Group’s National Black Art Convention at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982. This new research comes as many of the attendees, including organizer Keith Piper, Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, and Donald Rodney, are only just receiving the institutional attention they deserve, resulting in a slew of belated retrospectives, prizes, and Orders of the British Empire. In 2022, Boyce won the Golden Lion for her British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Rodney is currently the subject of a posthumous retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Himid will represent Britain at Venice next year, having won the Turner Prize in 2017.

Bakare’s book also explores British-Guyanese photographer Ingrid Pollard’s studies of rural life in the English countryside. Other chapters are dedicated to the Northern soul music and dance movement, sound systems, and dub poetry, among many other topics.

—Jo Lawson-Tancred

Les portes du rêve 1924–2024: Surrealism Through Its Journals by Franca Franchi

Cover of Surrealism Through Its Journals | Les portes du rêve 1924-2024. Courtesy of Skira.

This collection of 10 essays was conceived for the centenary of the publication of the first Manifeste du Surréalisme in October 1924. Edited by Franca Franchi of the University of Bergamo, the book brings fresh analyses of Surrealist journals and their interdisciplinary influence, uncovering lesser-known contributions, especially from women and international movements.

For example, one essay by Franca Bruera and Elena Galtsova looks at the journal Littérature and reveals highly innovative female contributions, which can be seen in the May 1920 issue of the journal with Céline Arnauld’s Dadaist manifesto.

The book also highlights under explored journals, like Experiment in Britain or Italian theater publications like Comœdia, which were critical to spreading Surrealist ideas beyond Paris. And it includes talks on lesser-known works like Marcel Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled (1916–17), first reproduced in View magazine in 1945. The essay suggests Duchamp manipulated advertising imagery in ways that prefigure contemporary conceptual art.

The essays also get political by tracing how magazines like Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution served as battlegrounds for ideological conflicts between a faction of Surrealists led by Andre Breton who aligned with communism and those who rejected party politics.

This is not a book of light reading. While the book contains images, they serve as reference points rather than the primary focus, making it more of a scholarly text than a visual archive. Maybe it is best suited for academics or laymen like me who just have a fascination with Surrealism’s lasting legacy.

—Adam Schrader