Elif Batuman’s mordantly witty Tituba traces its unnamed protagonist’s attempts to write a novel focused on the first person to confess at the notorious Salem witch trials, an enslaved Indigenous woman from South America. Tussling with the nature of fiction in general and “womanly” literature in particular, the writer pursues her project over decades, up to and beyond the point of desperation, as parallels between the historical and the personal arise, dissipate, and return.
Matched with an artwork by Louise Bonnet, the publication is part of Gagosian’s Picture Books, an imprint conceived by author Emma Cline and dedicated to publishing fiction by leading writers alongside contributions by celebrated contemporary artists.
Bonnet’s unsettling painting Enclosure 1 (2025) is marked by the artist’s characteristic subversion of the conventions of figure painting. Portraying an individual lying on a dark blanket, blond hair fanned out around their head, the composition incorporates a rectangle of salmon pink that obscures the rest of the scene, an obfuscatory gambit that parallels the strategic divergences of Batuman’s twisting narrative.
