Esopus 13 featured artists’ projects by Oliver Herring and Peter Krashes, Jeff Gibson, and Mickey Smith, as well as a portfolio of never-before-seen work by the severely autistic artist Alex Masket. It also included manuscript pages from poet Jennifer Moxley’s 2007 memoir On Writing The Middle Room, new fiction from Kelly Sandoval, and artifacts from the collection of the late, esteemed rare books librarian Marjorie G. Wynne. Also featured: new installments of two regular Esopus series—Modern Artifacts, which reproduced in facsimile materials from the MoMA archives (in this case, documents related to the museum’s first Matisse exhibition), and Guarded Opinions, featuring museum guards’ impressions of the art they oversee (for this issue, New Museum guard La’Quasia Risper took on an Urs Fischer sculpture). French historian Stéphane Gerson closed the issue with a fascinating analysis of visual representations of Nostradamus over the past 500 years.

For the issue’s themed CD, 11 musicians (including Laura Gibson, Frightened Rabbit, and Natureboy) were asked to create a new song inspired by one of Nostradamus’s prophecies.