John Ransom Phillips: A Contemporary Book of the Dead is an artist's monograph of watercolors on papyryus that

Growing up in the shadow of her superstar sister, Solange Knowles became a pivotal musician in her own right. Defying an industry that attempted to bend her to its rigid image of a Black woman, Solange continually experimented with her sound and embarked on a metamorphosis in her art that continues to this day. In Why Solange Matters, Stephanie Phillips chronicles the creative journey of an artist who became a beloved voice for the Black Lives Matter generation. A Black feminist punk musician herself, Phillips addresses not only the unpredictable trajectory of Solange Knowles's career but also how she and other Black women see themselves through the musician's repertoire. First, she traces Solange’s progress through an inflexible industry, charting the artist’s development up to 2016, when the release of her third album, A Seat at the Table, redefined her career. Then, with A Seat at the Table and 2019’s When I Get Home, Phillips describes how Solange embraced activism, anger, Black womanhood, and intergenerational trauma to inform her remarkable art. Why Solange Matters not only cements the place of its subject in the pantheon of world-changing twenty-first century musicians, it introduces its writer as an important new voice.

In a series of oils, watercolours, and prose full of wit and wisdom and rich with historical allusion, John Ransom Phillips portrays the complexity of nineteenth-century photographer, Mathew Brady. The photographs Brady made have long served to illustrate an era in American history, most notably his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and the images from the Civil War battlefields he captured. Pairing these photographs with his own work, Phillips explores the career of this artist who wanted to make history: An ambitious half-blind man with blue-tinted glasses, straw hat and duster who had the genius to look beyond his thriving New York portrait studio to the battles of the Civil War and was one of the first photographers to shoot in the open air. Paradoxically, Brady sent assistants to photograph his most famous scenes, the battlefields at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam, instructing them to re-arrange the dead to create images that would enhance public notions about death and dying. AUTHOR: John Ransom Phillips is an artist and author whose work has been exhibited internationally at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art in Chicago; Museo de Arte Moderne in Buenos Aires; the Fundacao de Arte e Cultural de Ubatuba in Sao Paolo, and Zamalek Gallery, Cairo. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and has been a faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Alan Trachtenberg is The Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University, and the author of 'Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans'(1989). 266 colour & 17 b/w illustrations

"I share the country's admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans." --President Barack Obama It was just another day on the job for fifty-three-year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, the United States-flagged cargo ship which was carrying, among other things, food and agricultural materials for the World Food Program. That all changed when armed Somali pirates boarded the ship. The pirates didn't expect the crew to fight back, nor did they expect Captain Phillips to offer himself as hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew. Thus began the tense five-day stand-off, which ended in a daring high-seas rescue when U.S. Navy SEALs opened fire and picked off three of the captors. "It never ends like this," Captain Phillips said. And he's right. A Captain's Duty tells the life-and-death drama of the Vermont native who was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores. A story of adventure and courage, it provides the intimate details of this high-seas hostage-taking--the unbearable heat, the death threats, the mock executions, and the escape attempt. When the pirates boarded his ship, Captain Phillips put his experience into action, doing everything he could to safeguard his crew. And when he was held captive by the pirates, he marshaled all his resources to ensure his own survival, withstanding intense physical hardship and an escalating battle of wills with the pirates. This was it: the moment where training meets instinct and where character is everything. Richard Phillips was ready.

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The literary greatness of the South In the early 1920s a collection of young Southerners at Vanderbilt University formed the literary group known as the Fugitives. Over the next few decades they and their followers would exert an enormous influence on the study of literature. Indeed, the "Southern Critics" included some of the most important American writers and critics of the twentieth century: Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, to name just a few. In The Southern Critics: An Anthology, editor Glenn C. Arbery gathers the most penetrating essays by these and other writers, bringing their significant contribution back into focus. Arbery's enlightening commentary allows us to understand how the Southern Critics' concern for the history and culture of the South informed all their work--not just the landmark Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930) but even their writings on literature and poetry, including their revolutionary "New Criticism." Remarkably, the essays collected here speak to our time as much as to the Southern Critics' own. In the twenty-first century we recognize the prescience of their warnings about would happen to art, leisure, and time itself when everything fell under the sway of the industrial model