From the moment its merlot satin ribbon is untied, Sophie Calle's seductive artist's book Double Game draws the viewer into a world with blurred boundaries. During her acclaimed international career, Calle has developed a distinctive style that blends diaristic writing and narrative framework with beguiling photographs. Embracing the details of everyday life, she chronicles the intimate discoveries made from adopting various roles, such as a stripper or a chambermaid, and merging the personal with the voyeuristic.

Calle's willingness to be the central figure in her work, and her propensity to mingle fact and fiction, inspired novelist Paul Auster to create a character, Maria Turner, based on her for his book Leviathan. Following Double Game's silvery endpapers, a facsimile excerpt from Leviathan sets up the interplay between the fictional Maria and her source, as Calle annotates Auster's text in red pen to reveal the varying degrees of truth. Double Game then unfolds in a tripartite fashion — revealing Calle's interpretations of Auster's character embellishments, presenting a mini-retrospective of projects that inspired Auster, and documenting a direct collaboration between the novelist and artist.

Unfurling like a Möbius strip of identity, the fictional artistic pursuits of Maria proved fertile ground for Calle. Vibrant images of monochromatic meals and alphabetic escapades reveal her take on Maria's restrictive rituals, including a day lived under the letter B, as shown in the Big-Time Blond Bimbo image on the book's cover. Double Game culminates with The Gotham Handbook, in which Calle becomes the protagonist in a New York City story shaped by Auster's prescriptions, but ultimately told through Calle's sharp observations and documentary-style photographs.

-Catherine Krudy