I found myself… the last dreams, Naguib Mahfouz (New Directions, 2025)

Translated from Arabic and with an introduction by Hisham Matar

Photographs by Diana Matar

In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed writer Hisham Matar—appear here with fantastical dreamlike photographs by the photographer Diana Matar that mysteriously evoke and open up Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn. In the haunting miniatures of I Found Myself …, recurring female characters, one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth in particular, seem to embody Cairo herself. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women float through these affecting, brief tales dreamed by a mind too creative to go silent, even at rest. A tender, personal introduction by Hisham, recollecting how he and Diana met Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo not long after an assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.

Of the nearly forty novels of NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911–2006), the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and the memoirs The Return, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in New York and London. 

Diana Matar devotes years to projects that capture the unseen traces of human history. Her photography explores how aesthetics influences the portrayal of power as it acts on individuals, nature, and society. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs: Evidence (2014) and My America (2024). My America was nominated for the Tim Hetherington Grant, longlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award and finalist in Photo España books of the year. Matar’s work has been exhibited in more than 30 international institutions and is held in the collections of Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, British Museum amongst many others. Her honors include a Ford Foundation Grant, the International Fund for Documentary Photography Award, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, and two Arts Council England Grants. She is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery and serves as Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Alexander Dumbadze in conversation with Cameron Martin

A defining figure of the 1970s–80s New York art world, Jack Goldstein’s wide-ranging body of work, which included immaculate color films and radiant paintings of appropriated images composed by assistants, is both seductive and interpretively elusive. Goldstein’s legacy has been complicated by the mythology of his later years. Consumed by drug addiction, he dropped out of the art world in the 1990s, lived alone in an East Los Angeles trailer park, and resurfaced in a wave of critical fanfare at the turn of the millennium, before taking his own life in 2003.

Employing his signature blend of biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research, Alexander Dumbadze examines Goldstein’s life and career, homing in on the artist’s refusal to distinguish between mental and actual images. Progressing chronologically through key moments in Goldstein’s artistic and intellectual formation, the book offers a deeply complex portrait of this significant artist, along with a nuanced meditation on the nature of images, the meaning of artistic subjectivity, and the consequences of holding unwavering faith in art. 

Alexander Dumbadze is an Associate Professor of Art History at George Washington University. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-author and co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Cameron Martin is an artist whose paintings, drawings and collages have been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He received his BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University and went on to study at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his work is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York.

The News from Dublin: Stories(Scribner, 2026)

 Colm Tóibín 

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras.

In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.

Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (FSG Originals, 2026)

The rabbi is, to the untrained eye, far from desirable. Lofty and disorderly, aging and constantly losing members of his flock, he is nonetheless the singular object of obsession for the self-abjecting narrator of My Lover, the Rabbi. From the start of their psychosexual affair, the two men torment, pleasure, and manipulate each other with ardor. When they’re apart, the narrator manically contemplates every element of the rabbi’s being: his alluring adopted son, his false erudition, his patrilineage, his broken-down Pontiac, his out-of-state husband (who the narrator has also slept with), and, maybe most of all, the universe between the rabbi’s legs. Spending time together in the narrator’s bed, in a tiny town near Hoboken, New Jersey, that our narrator is “devastated to admit is my personal address,” a tender, volatile intimacy brews and curdles. To sustain it, the narrator continues on an unrelenting, increasingly urgent quest to understand the mercurial, ardent rabbi’s mysterious past—that is, until he begins to question reality itself. In the process, conflicting truths about the rabbi emerge, with drastic consequences for both men and those around them.

The first novel in nearly twenty years from one of our most acclaimed stylists, Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi is a sui generis spiral of lascivious thrills and uncanny hilarity, exposing in delirious detail the dangers—and spoils—of true love.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His many books span poetry, essay collections, biography, and fiction; he is also an accomplished playwright and the librettist for the opera adaptation of his book Jackie Under My Skin. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays and poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, and many other publications. A widely shown painter, he released his first album of piano and voice in 2017. He lives in New York.

Bill Goldstein reviews books for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York, and was founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown. He was awarded a 2024-25 Public Scholars grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support his work on the book. He is the author of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, published in 2017.

Lynne Tillman: Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture (David Zwirner Books, 2026)

Paying Attention gathers nearly seventy of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. In a piece on the artist Robert Gober, she notes, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” 
 
In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself deftly layers the art, voice, and language of criticism. With cover art by Paul Chan, this collection is for ludic and serious readers alike.

Lynne Tillman’s latest novel is Men and Apparitions. Her essays and stories appear in Aperture, Bookforum, Frieze, n+1, Granta, Tank, and in art catalogues, artist books, and other magazines. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and The Academy of Arts and Letters Katherine Anne Porter Prize for contributions to literature. She lives in New York with the bassist David Hofstra.

Christine Smallwood is the author of The Life of the Mind and La Captive. She is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. 

Elizabeth Zuba is the author of three books of poetry—Where Is Everyone! (Conduit), which won the 2024 Minds on Fire Book Prize, Decoherent the Wingèd (SplitLevel), and the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave)—and the translator of multiple poetry and artists’ books from the Spanish, French, and Portuguese, including several by Marcel Broodthaers. She was the recipient of the 2016 French Voices Award for translation, and her books Not Nothing and Frog Pond Splash (both on Ray Johnson, Siglio) were selected as NYT Best Art Books of the Year in 2014 and 2020. 

anna moschovakis is a writer, translator, and performer. Her most recent book is An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unhinged novel about shadow selves, cults, and method acting. anna lives in the Catskill mountains and at the edge of the Mojave desert. More at  badutopian.com. 

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including Animal Days (Wave, 2021), The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks(Wave Books, 2018),and most recently A Guide for Making Fragments and Diaries. He is editor-in-chief of Wave Books and a translator whose publications include Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade and 5 Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat (both translated with Alejandro de Acosta), as well as Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. 

The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death
Jalal Toufic in conversation with Walid Raad

“Today, and has been for some time, the most original thinker on the planet.” — Etel Adnan

192 Books is pleased to present a conversation between Jalal Toufic and artist Walid Raad on the occasion of the New York premiere of The Collected Writings (1991-2024) of a Mortal to Death, the first volume in a landmark three-volume series from No Place Press gathering the complete works of philosopher, writer, and artist Jalal Toufic.

Published in December 2025, the series brings together newly revised editions of Toufic’s earlier books alongside new writing, arranged and organized by the author himself — offering both a rigorous introduction for new readers and a comprehensive view of over thirty years of thought for those already immersed in his work.

Central to Toufic’s project are a set of singular concepts — the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, the dancer’s two bodies — ideas that have shaped a generation of thinkers and artists working at the intersection of philosophy, film, literature, and contemporary aesthetics.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. Many if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, continue to be forthcoming even after their publication. He was most recently a participant in the Sharjah Biennial 11, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 13, “Six Lines of Flight” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and “A History: Art, Architecture, and Design, from the 1980s Until Today” (Centre Pompidou). In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD; and in 2013-2014, he and Anton Vidokle, led Ashkal Alwan’s third edition of Home Workspace Program, based in Beirut.

Walid Raad (b. 1967, Chbaniyeh, Lebanon) works across installation, performance, video, and photography to explore how historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and narrative. He is well-known for The Atlas Group, a 14-year project about the contemporary history of Lebanon. Raad’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 11 and 13, the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the first Vienna Biennale, the Whitney Biennial (2000 and 2002), and the 50th Venice Biennale. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Carré d’Art, Nîmes. His 2015 survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthaus Zürich; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.

“What labor to live forever. Speak of the elect what can you do in all this world so much life in the little of it.“

192 Books is pleased to present a joint reading between Susan Howe and Ben Lerner to celebrate Howe’s new book of poems Penitential Cries and Lerner’s new novel Transcription.

In four parts, Susan Howe’s new book opens with the arresting long prose poem “Penitential Cries,” followed by a group of word-collages “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in “the evening of life,” Howe quotes Thomas Wyatt: My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She says: “I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven,” the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, “I want to express my pilgrim’s progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It’s getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming.”

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the air when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Susan Howe was born in Boston in 1937. Sixteen of her books are published by New Directions. “Our finest metaphysical poet” (The Village Voice), Susan Howe has been called “as fascinating and compelling as any writer we have” (The Harvard Review), and “as clear and fresh as a draught of well water” (John Ashbery). 

Ben Lerner is the acclaimed author of several books of poetry and prose. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

“Caetano speaks of a self that has been torn in two and that—musically, wisely, tenderly—no longer yearns for unity.”

— Lucy Ives

192 Books is pleased to present a reading and discussion between Alexis Almeida and Grace Nissan on the occasion of the launch of Caetano by Almeida.

Imagined as a series of experiments in autobiography, Caetano invokes the name of the author’s grandfather to write toward the mystery of family, originals, and their ruptures, breaks, and re-imaginings. Written from distinct positions in time, the poems in this collection think about the (im)possibility of faithful reproduction, the space between an original and its translation, and the moving target of a portrait as it moves through different narrative forms. 

Alexis Almeida is the author of Caetano (Ugly Duckling Presse 2026), and most recently the translator of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems (The Song Cave, 2024). Her translation of Laura Fernández’s There’s a Monster in the Lake is forthcoming from Graywolf in the fall of 2026. She lives in New York and edits 18 Owls Press.

Grace Nissan is a poet and translator. Their recent books include The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and translations of Bourgeois Coldness by Henrike Kohpeiß (Divided Publishing), kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books), and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets(New Directions / isolarii).