Published: January 2012

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Writing his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes didn't imagine anything like the scene that comes two-thirds into Michel Houellebecq's fifth and latest novel, The Map and the Territory, which appeared in English last week. There we read in grisly detail about the murder and dismemberment of a character named and modeled after Houellebecq. Where Barthes wished to banish authorial biography and intention from literary criticism, Houellebecq's presence is unmistakable. Besides appearing as a character blessed with some of the book's best dialogue, the narrator's style is almost sarcastically flat, emphasizing words and phrases by simply putting them in italics, constantly reminding the reader of his authorial voice.

Published: December 2011

Discontinuity is one of the few constants among the 78 images in Untitled Photographs by Tim Barber, recently published by OHWOW. The artist's first monograph includes black-and-white and color work spanning the past 15 years and varies—wildly and in every way imaginable—in subject matter, style, method and affect. The Canadian-born, New York-based Barber courts this apparent inconsistency so aggressively that it's a stance, although the implications of his position are ambiguous. It is unclear whether he figures his eye alone provides understated coherence to the assembled exposures, or if he considers the entire issue of authorial sensibility irrelevant-perhaps outmoded.

Published: December 2011

Publisher: Prestel

After long production delays, the catalogue related to "Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context," a wide-ranging two-part exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in 2006, was finally published earlier this month. The interesting but odd volume raises a fundamental question: should it echo the intention and methods of the curatorial project, or build on its premise? To its detriment, Twice Drawn attempts to replicate the complexities of the exhibition.

Published: December 2011

Publisher: Pantheon

Pantheon's MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is a kind of "making of" Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic memoir, Maus. The 300-page full-color hardback and companion DVD abound with source materials—interviews with the author, photographs, letters, art—presented in parallel with a conversation between editor Hillary Chute and Spiegelman. The title transcends footnote: MetaMaus is a work of criticism in itself, providing not only notes on process and sources, but considering the entirety of a family, and the thinking of influences of an artist now and at the time the work was created.

Published: December 2011

Publisher: Hirmer

Particle physicists' quest to replicate the hypothetical Higgs boson has never looked as promising as it does this week. And it probably has never looked as good as it does in Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines, just published by Hirmer. Having gained access to a variety of labs on five continents, the Brooklyn-based artist has taken ravishing, even intimate photographs of the objects they were built to house—the enormous, phenomenally complex machines used to study subatomic particles. Approaching his subject in the spirit of detailed research, Greenberg achieves a quirky but convincing reconciliation of the imperatives of artistic and scientific investigation.