Sibyl Kempson's Let Us Know Praise Susan Sontag is an irrational musical contemplation of collision of art and journalism.

Through a transnational perspective, Emily M. Hinnov's Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years identifies and describes modernist "choran community" as a previously understudied key counter-narrative to Modernism's engagement with early twentieth-century master narratives. Hinnov uses the term choran community in order to emphasize the almost sacred nature of the experience represented in common by select modernist texts, photographs, and photo-texts produced in the interwar period. As Hinnov describes, choran community comes about as a result of the "choran moment," or, textual instant when characters and/or readers (re)cognize their connection with a larger, inherently unified whole. Whether in a visual, verbal, or hybrid text, the stasis of the choran moment contains the potent possibility of communal awareness, or choran community, in the future as well as the present. The textual choran communities presented here consequently offset the sexist, racist, and classist solipsism of imperialist or fascist master narrative. Emily N. Hinnov is Assistant Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, Firelands College.

"There is no night in the ICU. There is day, lesser day, then day again. There are rhythms. Every twelve hours: shift change. Report: first all together in the big room, then at the bedside, nurse to nurse. Morning rounds. A group of doctors moves slowly through the unit like a harrow through a field. At each room, like a game, a different one rotates into the center. They leave behind a trail of new orders. Wean, extubate, titrate, start this, stop that, scan, film, scope. The steep hill the patient is asked to climb. Can you breathe on your own? Can you wake up? Can you live?"—Where Night Is Day Where Night Is Day is a nonfiction narrative grounded in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour rhythms of an ICU in a teaching hospital in the heart of New Mexico. It takes place over a thirteen-week period, the time of the average rotation of residents through the ICU. It begins in September and ends at Christmas. It is the story of patients and families, suddenly faced with critical illness, who find themselves in the ICU. It describes how they navigate through it and find their way. James Kelly is a sensitive witness to the quiet courage and resourcefulness of ordinary people. Kelly leads the reader into a parallel world: the world of illness. This world, invisible but not hidden, not articulated by but known by the ill, does not readily offer itself to our understanding. In this context, Kelly reflects on the nature of medicine and nursing, on how doctors and nurses see themselves and how they see each other. Drawing on the words of medical historians, doctor-writers, and nursing scholars, Kelly examines the relationship of professional and lay observers to the meaning of illness, empathy, caring, and the silence of suffering. Kelly offers up an intimate portrait of the ICU and its inhabitants.

From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award. "The masterpiece of the ‘I knew Susan’ minigenre" – A.O. Scott, The New York Times A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute. Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” Sontag’s influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as “a natural mentor” who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, “someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation.” Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner. The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed. Given today's growing economic inequality, the photograph feels pointedly relevant. The FSA, established in 1935, commissioned photographers to document the impact of the Great Depression in America and used the photographs to advertise aid relief. For four weeks in the summer of 1936, Evans collaborated with Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The result of that project was the landmark publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting three sharecropper families and their environment. These photographs were intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, and of their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. Kitchen Corner powerfully evokes Agee's observations of the significance of “bareness and space” in these homes: “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another... [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.”

Focusing on American fiction from 1850-1940, Narrating Class in American Fiction offers close readings in the context of literary and political history to detail the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities.

In ""American Silences"", Joseph Anthony Ward offers a unique analysis of the use and effects of silence in modern American realistic art. Beginning with the nineteenth-century literature that laid the foundation for silence in art, he moves to a brief analysis of Sherwood Anderson's ""Winesburg"", Ohio and Ernest Hemingway's ""In Our Time"", showing how they, along with several other crucial works of twentieth-century American realism, incorporate the power of the silent into their expression without sacrificing the subjects and techniques of traditional realism. Examining ""Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"", James Agee's commentary on the life of tenant farmers, documented with photographs by Walker Evans, Ward traces the book's pattern of 'silence, then silence disturbed by sound, and ultimately silence restored'. Ward further supports his theory with a study of Agee's ""A Death in the Family"" and Evans' ""American Photographs"". Ward sees Agee's admiration of photography as a connection between the silence of the scenes he writes about and the silence of Evans' photographs. The use of silence is perhaps even more obvious in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Although throughout the book Ward suggests both the positive and negative qualities of silence in art, Hopper's paintings provide little in the way of postiveness. For Ward, the art of silence is an art of extreme concentration that seeks essences rather than superficiality that nearly transcends realism itself. The theme of silence in American realism is a significant new one, but Ward's interpretation of the prose and his analysis of the photographs and paintings, many of which are reproduced in this book, establish validity for art as the voice of silence.