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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet, the pioneering art magazine Metronome provides an example of how a print publication can engage with a community of readers and contributors While online publishing allows for ambitious publications that cater to a small audience, the ability of the web to reach anyone, anywhere makes such small-scale operations seem futile or unambitious The internet has modified our understanding of what publics are and can be: when distribution brings with it larger discussions about discourse and its limitations not because of physical accessibility, but because of a lack of shared points of access, the real achievement – and legacy – of a small magazine is in its provision of a space for dialogue rather than its creation of a public This is a useful example – if not the ultimate one – for considering publishing as a curatorial practice And with that, to suggest that the production of art magazines, both in print and online, can be a more nuanced, more open practice than the role assigned to it in the incessant conversations about the current state of publishing   The director of one of the very few libraries in the United States to keep copies of Metronome emails me: ‘There are twelve issues total for Metronome,’ she writes ‘The first issue in 1996 begins with “0” rather than “1” – one of the eccentricities of the publication’ She attaches the library records, which include the following notes: ‘Edited Clémentine Deliss Publication inter-culturelle des arts plastiques = Intercultural publication of the visual arts Four no a year Later issues vary in size, format, and languages’   Issue 0 of Metronome was published in 2,000 copies in 1996, in Dakar Its first editorial read: ‘Metronome is the first edition of a new series of intercultural publications produced from Dakar and London It proposes a debate from within the visual arts, interpolating artists, critics, philosophers, historians, aestheticians, curators, patrons, and art enthusiasts’ At the time, Deliss, now director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, had just curated an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery as part of Africa ’95, a season focused on contemporary art from Africa, of which she was the artistic