Summer Reads: Books the Frieze Team Can’t Put Down

The War of Art (2025) | Lauren O’Neill-Butler

A book with backbone, Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s The War of Art (2025) draws on oral histories and archival research to elucidate the ways in which artists in the US have protested, agitated and organized since the late 1960s – from facilitating art programmes in prisons, to pushing for gender parity in museum exhibitions, to decrying governmental neglect at the outset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. ‘I’m not recounting history to memorialize,’ O’Neill-Butler told me in an interview about the book. ‘Instead, I want to offer a road map.’ I hope that readers take The War of Art’s generous insights to heart – and seek out books on artist protest outside the US next.

– CASSIE PACKARD, Assistant Editor

The Search for Othella Savage (2025) | Foday Mannah

Flitting between Scotland and Sierra Leone, this debut crime novel by Foday Mannah manages to include all the genre’s characteristic tropes – revelations, red herrings, cliffhangers – while charting the day-to-day experiences of migrant communities living and working in Edinburgh. Capturing moments of workaday domestic reality – a makeshift hair salon in a missing woman’s living room, for instance – offers a compelling counterpoint to the drama common in crime fiction, which too often erases the lives of its victims in favour of police chases and femmes fatales. Stylistically, too, Mannah is attuned to the sense of horror that can be provoked by a precise, undramatic sentence. One line I still remember, a few days after finishing the novel, describes the discovery of an unconscious woman in the boot of a car: ‘Scattered around her were numerous […] tree-shaped air fresheners.’

– LOU SELFRIDGE, Assistant Editor 

Wildcat Dome (2013/25) | Yuko Tsushima (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda)

For almost 40 years, Yuko Tsushima wrote some of the most quietly radical fiction in Japan, primarily exploring the personal lives of women who refused to comply with postwar normative social codes. She is perhaps best known for Territory of Light (1979), her portrait of a mother raising her daughter after a devastating divorce – once considered an unthinkable subject matter for a Japanese novelist. Wildcat Dome – first published in Japan in 2013, only three years before her death – has finally been translated into English. It follows the relationship between Mitch and Yonko, two old friends whose lives were shaped by the dissolution of empire and the catastrophic effects of nuclear power, from the atomic bomb to the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011. I will be carrying this extraordinary book with me all summer.

– ANDREW DURBIN, Editor in Chief

Fugitive Tilts (2025) | Ishion Hutchinson

This summer, I’m most looking forward to spending more time with poet Ishion Hutchinson’s book of essays, Fugitive Tilts, published by MACK last month. Reflecting on artists like Donald Rodney, Edouard Vuillard and Nari Ward, writers like Derek Walcott and Claude McKay and the photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi’s beautiful analogue images from his journeys across the globe, the personal texts – underpinned by a deep curiosity and fascination with the world – offer a generous insight into the poet’s rich intellectual life. It’s a book to savour slowly and carefully. Even if you aren’t travelling to new climes this summer, Hutchinson’s elegant prose invites us to consider the world – wherever we find ourselves – anew.

– VANESSA PETERSON, Senior Editor

Hunchback (2023/25) | Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton) 

Saou Ichikawa’s punchy debut novella, Hunchback, follows Shaka Izawa, a woman in her 40s with myotubular myopathy, who lives in a care home near Tokyo. She is active on social media under several aliases, where she shares candid reflections on her private desires and frustrations. When a new male caregiver discovers her online identity, he makes an unsettling proposition. I appreciated how blunt and unfiltered the book is; it draws powerfully from a subjectivity rarely heard in contemporary literature.

– SEAN BURNS, Associate Editor 

Cautery (2025) | Lucía Lijtmaer (translated by Maureen Shaughnessy)

Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery, newly out from Charco Press, interlaces the lives of two women separated by centuries yet united in their shared impulse to break away from the claustrophobic confines of the lives they have been dealt. The novel moves between alternating, sharply drawn scenes, packed with lyrical introspection and a cutting tone. In present-day Barcelona, a young woman finds herself in a relationship that curdles beneath its glossy surface, prompting a decisive rupture. Meanwhile, in the 17th century, having outlived her philandering husband who squandered her fortune, Deborah Moody flees to Massachusetts to start a new life. Lijtmaer’s characters are neither perfect nor particularly agreeable, but their cunning and angry dispositions are rendered with refreshing honesty. Cautery suggests that sometimes we need to tear everything down before we can start anew.

– IVANA CHOLAKOVA, Assistant Editor 

Aesthetics of Resistance (1981/2025) | Peter Weiss (translated by Joel Scott)

Diversity of Aesthetics (2025) | Andreas Petroissants and Jose Rosales 

Two trilogies top my reading list this summer: Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance and Andreas Petroissants and Jose Rosales’s Diversity of Aesthetics. The first – a labyrinthine masterwork whose third volume has at last been translated into English – follows resistance movements in Nazi Germany while exploring how political action and art can be intertwined. The second compiles three expansive and urgent roundtable conversations featuring the likes of Claire Fontaine, Saidiya Hartman and Michael Rakowitz. Conducted by the collection’s editors and In Defence of Looting (2020) author Vicky Osterweil, they together serve as a sort of manual on collectivity, the relationship between language and political struggle, and artmaking outside institutional frameworks – among other pressing concerns.

– MARKO GLUHAICH, Senior Editor