Art and the circumstances of its creation are at the center of three of our recommended books this week: Nicholas Fox Weber offers a comprehensive new biography of the abstract painter Piet Mondrian, Charles King traces the back story of Handel’s “Messiah,” and the graphic novelist Chris Ware ruminates in real time on the welcome distractions that parenthood puts in an artist’s way. Also up: a fun horror novel that doubles as a romance, and the start of a new detective series set in Arizona. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
MONDRIAN:
His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute
Nicholas Fox Weber
This big, beautiful and necessary book is a rare full-dress biography of Piet Mondrian, the reclusive Dutch-born painter who drifted from figurative painting to geometric and boldly colored abstractions instantly identifiable by their grids and super-luminous yellows, reds and whites. Weber traces Mondrian’s artistic evolution and gives a replete accounting of his personal quirks, including interests in spiritualism, phrenology and unusual diets.
THE ACME NOVELTY DATE-BOOK, VOLUME THREE
Chris Ware
Ware has built a career as a sort of astronaut exploring the nature of the consciousness, using his own intellect as a spaceship, and he has established a few themes in his gorgeous dispatches from the recesses of inner space: the inadequacy of his own abilities to this task; the capacity of comics to mimic memory; nostalgia and a corresponding suspicion of it. Here, in the last of three recent sketchbook compilations, those themes are disrupted by something wholly inimical to the tranquil contemplation of the self: fatherhood.
FEAST WHILE YOU CAN
Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
In this exciting new hybrid horror-romance novel, former enemies become lesbian lovers to do battle against an ancient entity that wants to devour more than just their bodies.
THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE
Sydney Graves
This crime novel — the first in a new detective series, written under a pseudonym by the accomplished novelist Kate Christensen — features a protagonist who works at an all-female detective agency in Tucson and is hired by the mother of a childhood friend to look into her daughter’s disappearance, summoning dark episodes from her past.
EVERY VALLEY:
The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s “Messiah”
Charles King
King uses Handel’s famous oratorio, the “greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” to illuminate a host of key historical forces and personalities from 18th-century Britain. A work of vivid social and cultural commentary, his book is also an in-depth study of artistic creation.
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