More from Books

On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern comes this portrait of Tracey Emin as a painter, told largely in her own words. It traces a remarkable trajectory, from gobby Margate teenager to one of the UK’s most respected and celebrated artists, and a Dame of the British Empire. At its heart is a series of conversations with Martin Gayford, a critic with a deep engagement with the nature of painting and insights gleaned from close friendships with 20th-century giants, Lucian Freud and David Hockney among them. It is a book full of heart – frank and confessional – and presents Emin at the zenith of her powers, having survived near-fatal cancer and found new purpose and conviction.

I think I’d be pretty hostile if I met my doppelganger – living proof of my mediocrity. My fragile ego even balks at being told I’m reminiscent of someone else. But, drawn as they are to the uncanny, authors just love doppelgangers. In As If, Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Waidner is the German-British author of four previous novels, including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. They are non-binary, and known for experimental writing. Many recent novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours, imagine middle-aged women abandoning their lives, but lately the male midlife crisis, while going strong in society, has been somewhat neglected in fiction – until now.

In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.

This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the present but also to explain how this body has been used to express both emotion and the attitudes of the day. Take Hiran Powers’s 1845 marble sculpture of a naked woman in chains, entitled ‘The Greek Slave’. This appeared after Britain had abolished slavery but before the American Civil War had put an end to it in the US. Thanks in part to the statue’s symbolism, beauty and perhaps also to its slight but titillating hint of bondage and thus of female subjection, it touched many nerves.