Pool Party!

“He got in the habit of leaving ‘things’ on the grass and lying right on the tiled edge of the pool—called ‘Heaven,’ short for ‘This is Heaven,’ as he often said after lunch” goes a line in André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote in his journal, “To plunge into water, to move one’s whole body, from head to toe … to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love.” And in Up Through the Water, Darcey Steinke writes, “What she really wanted was to stay in the water. The way she behaved on land … was just a compromise.” Meanwhile, the curator Lou Stoppard, editor of a new book on pools in art and photography, with contributions from Guy Bourdin, Alice Hawkins, Norman Parkinson, and others, writes simply, “Whenever I find water, I swim.” At a time when our next trip to the pool of our dreams might not be for a while, this collection takes you there. —Julia Vitale