"In her latest body of work, multimedia artist Shirin Neshat (born 1957) turns her focus to the American West. With more than 100 photographs, a two-channel video installation and a feature film, Neshat creates a multilayered look at contemporary America through the eyes of a fictionalized artist. Monumental black-and-white photographs are transformed through Neshat's use of Farsi text and images that have been hand-drawn onto the picture. The texts...

"Through her innovative experimentations across media, Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013) invented a powerful vocabulary that brought a unique perspective to the field of modern abstract art. Her use of nontraditional materials, such as wire, resulted in work that fosters a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties and transfigures the commonplace into metaphors for life processes. This revised edition of The Sculpture...

"The most original and authoritative voice of today's English lexicography presents a fully revised new edition of his beloved usage dictionary. When Bryan Garner published the first edition of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1999, the book quickly became one of the most influential style guides ever written for the English language. After four previous editions and over twenty years, our language has evolved in many ways, and the powerful...

For more than 40 years, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work-portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies-is that it is all "bred of a place," the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, has...

Brings together 110 selections by a diverse array of 95 writers from William Cullen Bryant to E. L. Doctorow. Represents a composite portrait of our greatest president told by the journalists, biographers, satirists, essayists, novelists, clergymen, poets, play-wrights, historians, memoirists, and statesmen who have shaped our understanding of Lincoln and his complex and crucial legacy over the last 150 years.

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith offers the first full portrait of the life and work of the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966) devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters boldly explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing...

Abstract: Personal papers, news clippings and manuscripts of writings by author and playwright Virginia Armistead Nelson, spanning the years 1906-1923. Many materials are undated. Scope and content: Personal papers consist of a small quantity of correspondence, particularly relating to her writing for the Nashville Banner newspaper and her submissions of works of fiction, plays, or poems to various magazines, agents, publishers or theatrical companies....