What to read this week, from Rebecca Solnit to Yoko Ono

BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, the prolific American writer and activist, is adept at finding light in the gloom: in books such as Hope in the Dark and Not Too Late, she makes the case that we can still find a path forward in a time of worsening conflict, regressive politics and climate disaster. In the battle against “white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide and climate denial”, her new book, Kathleen Jamie writes, is “something like a coach’s half-time pep talk”. It’s a winnable fight, Solnit argues, as she looks to the past to rediscover the practice and purpose of activism: to “make the invisible visible, the unheard heard, to bring in who or what has been shut out”.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora by Paul Morley

At the heart of Morley’s new study of Ono is her performance Cut Piece – a work, first performed in 1964, in which she sat motionless and invited the audience to cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. “Cut,” Ono said at the beginning – nothing more. It’s a provocative, profound piece that continues to fascinate, but despite a resurgence of interest in Yoko Ono (a major Tate Modern exhibition in 2024, a reverential biography in 2025), her life remains one of silences and shadows – the greatest shadow being that of her husband John Lennon. Can Morley, Lily Isaacs asks in her review, rescue her from the men that have so far obscured her genius?
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Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

Married couple Kate and Jack are archetypal privileged north London baby boomers. Phoebe is the millennial writer of a hit TV series: “a steamy, sexy, bitter, nasty, devastating piece full of self-confessedly autobiographical detail”. Watching it, Kate starts to notice details of her and Jack’s life on screen, raising disturbing questions about their relationship. As the plot unravels, John Lanchester brings to bear his sharp understanding of the world of money in this tale of entitlement and generation gaps. “It may,” writes Alex Preston, “be the darkest and most satisfying novel you’ll read this year.”
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ENDNOTES

Richard Ovenden writes:

Thames & Hudson’s logo – twin dolphins that face both east to New York and west to London – stare out from our bookshelves at home. Tom Phillips’s A Humument (all six editions), Hockney’s Pictures, Josef Koudelka’s Exiles and the magisterial Van Eyck exhibition catalogue rub shoulders with other imprints, but no other publisher is so present. The Art of the Book is a glorious celebration of both the power of books, and the power of reading them. It was Thomas Neurath’s idea to mark the firm’s 75th anniversary with this volume, showing its history as much through images as through words. Deeply urbane and cultured, Thomas inherited these traits from his parents Walter and Eva – Jewish refugees from Vienna and Berlin respectively – who founded the firm. Thomas ensured that the company’s publishing remained respectful of the past but constantly sought emerging trends across all aspects of modern culture. He died last year, and this book is as much as tribute to him as it is to the firm he devoted his life to.
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance