"Beautifully written in an engaging style, this book provides a new perspective on turn-of-the-century American culture that nuances and complicates our vision of that historical moment. I have no doubt that it will become a classic text in American studies, the history of American art, and the study of visual culture."—Kathleen Pyne, author of Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America "Michael Leja, one of our most original and acute historians of American art, has written an indispensable and lively study of what we might call the modern anxiety of seeing. He traces our inherently skeptical view of the world back to the turn of the last century, a golden age of hucksters, swindlers, quacks, humbugs, rascals, cheats, and confidence men, and shows how artists as diverse as Eakins and Duchamp fit into this new culture of suspicion. Leja's book breathes fresh life into the period."—Michael Kimmelman "Bringing together the strangest of bedfellows-paintings by Thomas Eakins, spirit photographs, William Harnett's still lifes, occult philosophies, Duchamp readymades-Leja uncovers a deep culture of suspicion and skepticism in America around 1900. As Americans grappled with the complexities of modern life, 'seeing was not believing,' he argues in this deeply researched and brilliantly provocative study."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935

Michael Leja offers a new, specifically visual, model for understanding American art in the decades before and after 1900.

A classic of northern exploration and adventure, LAST PLACES is Lawrence Millman's marvelously told account of his journey along the ancient Viking sea routes that extend from Norway to Newfoundland. Traveling through landscapes of transcendent desolation, Millman wandered by way of the Shetland Islands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. His way was marked by surprising human encounters--with a convicted murderer in Reykjavik, an Inuit hermit in Greenland, an Icelandic guide who leads him to a place called Hell, and a Newfoundlander who warns him about the local variant of the Abominable Snowman. By turns earthy and lyrical, LAST PLACES is an ebullient celebration of the exotic North.

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2013 WINNER OF THE SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE 2013 What if everything you’d ever wanted was no longer enough? Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. But then Rachel’s cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid – and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many. 'Wonderful...witty...an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali' Stylist

DIVExamines what happens to our paradigms of the American south if we understand the "south" hemispherically, to include Latin America and the Caribbean./div