Yield

“Anne Truitt’s Yield has a tone that is rich and spare, considered and sensuous, inward-looking and utterly vibrant and vivid, fully alive in the world, inspiring for the reader.”—Colm Tóibín, author of The Master

“Extraordinary.”—Edmund de Waal, The Guardian

“In its stripped-down intimacy, Yield shows Truitt at her most eloquent in demonstrating, as her sculptures do, that all revelation in art is self-revelation.”—Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal

“Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths. . . . A model of discipline and open-ended inquiry and a welcome counterweight to the kind of anxieties that so often accompany a creative practice.”—Megan O’Grady, New Yorker

“Her sculptures spoke in restrained form, but the artist’s journals reveal the complexities of thought and experience behind them.”— Wall Street Journal

Named by the New Yorker as a Best Book of 2022

“Anne Truitt’s Yield has a tone that is rich and spare, considered and sensuous, inward-looking and utterly vibrant and vivid, fully alive in the world, inspiring for the reader.”—Colm Tóibín, author of The Master

“As a previously unpublished manuscript from Truitt’s archive, Yield affords us the opportunity to see the artist in an unusually raw state. Her words are unfailingly erudite and abundantly human.”—Miguel de Baca, author of Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture

“Completed two years before Truitt’s death, Yield recounts in crystalline prose the decline of her generation, the horrors of 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror,’ and the gratification her art brings even as its execution proves more difficult. Here is Truitt’s finest work of writing: a book as spare and deep, and ultimately wordless, as her art.”—James Meyer, author of The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture

“This extraordinary journal is Anne Truitt’s record of a searching intelligence, her meditations on memory, loss, creating art, creating a family and on age. It is a remarkable book, a tuning into ‘very tiny singular differences’ in a way that reveals Truitt’s singular brilliance as both artist and writer.”—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“I have always kept Anne Truitt’s Daybook, Turn , and Prospect near me as I write. Yield is a rich encounter with the same searching, wise voice of a woman artist grappling with the complexities of her life and work. What a gift it is to have her voice in my ears once again.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance



Anne Truitt was an American artist whose bold use of geometry and color signaled a new direction for modern sculpture. Today she is internationally acclaimed not just for her art but for her journals of her life as an artist. Rachel Kushner is an award-winning writer known for her art criticism and her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018). Her new book, The Hard Crowd (2021), collects twenty years of essays. Alexandra Truitt is the daughter of Anne Truitt and the noted American journalist James Truitt.