In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter – with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book – and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists – Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman and Roland Barthes, among many others – in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

‘Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, writer, thinker and person.’
— Maggie Nelson, Artforum

‘A rich anthology of ideas, broad in its scope, and undoubtedly rewarding.’
— Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

‘The essays in Index Cards gather and swell with invisible force, disperse and settle like the dust Davey blows from the tops of her books.’
— Emily LaBarge, Bookforum

‘Erudite, subtle, daring thoughts about film and photography, text and image, art and life.’
— Brian Dillon, 4Columns