We may be approaching the midpoint of summer, but Helen Levitt’s warm, observant photographs of New York City preserve the humor and poetry of street life all year long. A comprehensive new book on the late photographer, who spent nearly seven decades recording moments of levity and connection in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, offers an ideal antidote to the mid-summer scaries — a reminder that the quiet pleasures of everyday life do not come and go with the seasons.
Critic Natalie Weis takes up the new volume in a reflection published today. Her consideration joins a wider look at art books suited to July reading, with titles that extend the season’s literary reach beyond the usual summer fare.
Also in this edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator Benjamin Moser examines a biography of the intrepid Hudson River painter Frederic Edwin Church. In the book, author Victoria Johnson presents a measured portrait of the artist, whose work, Moser writes, “managed to convey all the nation’s fears — of slavery, war, and disunion — through moody images of clouds and trees.”
Additional art books round out the month below, including a nod to Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists by Susan Gubar, which remains well worth revisiting as you assemble your next summer reading list.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
