Heide Hatry’s art investigates matter and the decay of matter—more specifically, the corporality of the human and nonhuman dead. While her medium consists of flesh, meat, and ash, there is another essential component of her work that has not received recognition: the books she makes for each project, each of which are integral, not supplemental, to her larger oeuvre.

I would like to attempt a transparent approach to a mysterious subject.

Books draw on books to get themselves written and this can be a problem.

The Chinese storyteller Can Xue (“Dirty Snow”) has written many justly celebrated stories about magic mountains, disappearing shoes, perceptive cats and dead uncles, but in Five Spice Street, her first novel to be translated into English, she has written a social novel about a street that survives on daydreams.