This volume contains one hundred of the greatest war pictures ever taken. Union troops in battle, Lincoln at Antietam, the ruins of Richmond, Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and more. It became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers would come to know the war. This classic also became foundational in the history of American photography, combining, for the first time, words and images in a sophisticated and moving account.

Few writers had to confront so many of the last century's mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman. He is likely to be remembered, above all, for the terrifying clarity with which he writes about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman; it is notable for its warmth, its sense of fun and for the benign humility that is always to be found in his writing. After the 'arrest' - as Grossman always put it - of Life and Fate, Grossman took on the task of editing a literal Russian translation of a lengthy Armenian novel. The novel was of little interest to him, but he was glad of an excuse to travel to Armenia. This is his account of the two months he spent there. It is by far the most personal and intimate of Grossman's works, with an air of absolute spontaneity, as though Grossman is simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia - its mountains, its ancient churches and its people.

In her comprehensive study of American sketch writing, Kristic Hamilton gives new insight into the powers of mass-market intimacy more personal and home-like than home - and into leisure, which as a component of middle-class identity is quite as imperative in its achievement as disciplined morality. Here, also, is a more complex story of the aesthetic, as a class-inflected realm, in which factory women and rural and urban middle-class authors debate the shape of literature and life.

For the last fifteen years, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska, steadily compiling a lyrical, if equivocal, response to the American Heartland. In loosely-collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in cognitive dissonance and unexpected harmonies, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. Omaha Sketchbook is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power.

Photographs taken in the field provide an extraordinary commentary upon the Civil War