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The states of Northern Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California Norte and Sur—have architecture, urbanism, and landscape design that offer numerous lessons in how to build well, but this constructed environment is largely undervalued or unknown. To make this architecture better known to a wide professional, academic, and public audience, this book presents the first comprehensive overview in either English or Spanish of the architecture, urban landscapes, and cities of Northern Mexico from the country’s emergence as a modern nation in 1821 to the present day.

Profusely illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, maps, and analytical drawings of urban cores of major cities, The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico systematically examines significant works of architecture in large cities and small towns in each state, from the earliest buildings in the urban core to the newest at the periphery. Edward R. Burian describes the most memorable works of architecture in each city in greater detail in terms of their spatial organization, materials, and sensory experience. He also includes a concise geographical and historical summary of the region that provides a useful background for the discussions of the works of architecture. Burian concludes the book with a brief commentary on lessons learned and possible futures for the architectural culture of the region, as well as the first comprehensive biographical listing of the architects practicing in Northern Mexico during the past two centuries.

Among the vast treasures discovered in Peru since its conquest by Pizarro, only a small fraction has been excavated scientifically. The Art and Archaeology of Pashash is an account of the discovery and excavation of one of the richest Pre-Columbian burials ever scientifically excavated in Peru. The tomb and its offerings unearthed at Pashash, in the northern Andes, provide new perspectives on the cultural meaning of Andean funerary treasure.

About A.D. 500 the flexed body of an aristocrat was wrapped in cloth and set in a small tomb sealed by a heavy stone. Three separate offerings were put in place during the construction of the funerary temple above the tomb. Near the body were placed about fifty large gold pins with elaborately sculptured heads, the most important set of Peruvian metalwork scientifically recorded in context. Decorated pottery also accompanied the body. Beneath the doorway to the temple chamber above the tomb a second offering was placed, composed of vessels modeled as jaguars, snakes, and dragonlike combinations of the two, with other fine pottery, unfired clay bowls, and stone bowls. The images in this offering represented the theology of a shamanistic religion. A third offering of broken ritual vessels was placed in the earth fill just before the temple floor was built.

This collection of several hundred works of art found together and dated by radiocarbon, related to a stratigraphic sequence for the site as a whole, makes possible a unique history of the art of this highland Andean region. Grieder describes the phases of development and the symbolism of the previously little-known Recuay style of pottery and attributes many works to individuals, illuminating the role of artists and their relations with their patrons. Among the author's discoveries is evidence of the use of potters' wheels and lathes to make ceramic and stone vessels and ritual objects, reversing the long-held contention that these tools were unknown in Pre-Columbian America.

The Art and Archaeology of Pashash will be valuable to specialists in Andean archaeology as well as to those interested in the art and culture of Pre-Columbian America.

Renowned for their monumental architecture and rich visual culture, the Moche inhabited the north coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period (AD 100-800). Archaeological discoveries over the past century and the dissemination of Moche artifacts to museums around the world have given rise to a widespread and continually increasing fascination with this complex culture, which expressed its beliefs about the human and supernatural worlds through finely crafted ceramic and metal objects of striking realism and visual sophistication.

In this standard-setting work, an international, multidisciplinary team of scholars who are at the forefront of Moche research present a state-of-the-art overview of Moche culture. The contributors address various issues of Moche society, religion, and material culture based on multiple lines of evidence and methodologies, including iconographic studies, archaeological investigations, and forensic analyses. Some of the articles present the results of long-term studies of major issues in Moche iconography, while others focus on more specifically defined topics such as site studies, the influence of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on Moche society, the nature of Moche warfare and sacrifice, and the role of Moche visual culture in decoding social and political frameworks.

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas

Built to bring Christianity and European civilization to the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...secularized and left to decay in the nineteenth century...and restored in the twentieth century, the Spanish missions still standing in Texas are really only shadows of their original selves. The mission churches, once beautifully adorned with carvings and sculptures on their façades and furnished inside with elaborate altarpieces and paintings, today only hint at their colonial-era glory through the vestiges of art and architectural decoration that remain.

To paint a more complete portrait of the missions as they once were, Jacinto Quirarte here draws on decades of on-site and archival research to offer the most comprehensive reconstruction and description of the original art and architecture of the six remaining Texas missions—San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio and Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo in Goliad. Using church records and other historical accounts, as well as old photographs, drawings, and paintings, Quirarte describes the mission churches and related buildings, their decorated surfaces, and the (now missing) altarpieces, whose iconography he extensively analyzes. He sets his material within the context of the mission era in Texas and the Southwest, so that the book also serves as a general introduction to the Spanish missionary program and to Indian life in Texas.

A richly illustrated collection of essays on visual biblical interpretation

For centuries Christians have engaged their sacred texts as much through the visual as through the written word. Yet until recent decades, the academic disciplines of biblical studies and art history largely worked independently. This volume bridges that gap with the interdisciplinary work of biblical scholars and art historians. Focusing on the visualization of biblical characters from both the Old and New Testaments, essays illustrate the potential of such collaboration for a deeper understanding of the Bible and its visual reception. Contributions from Ian Boxall, James Clifton, David B. Gowler, Jonathan Homrighausen, Heidi J. Hornik, Jeff Jay, Christine E. Joynes, Yohana A. Junker, Meredith Munson, and Ela Nuțu foreground diverse cultural contexts and chronological periods for scholars and students of the Bible and art.

Showing how poetics provides a path for building new imagined possibilities

Drawing together a robust corpus of contemporary USAmerican poetry, The Art of Breaking Worlds explores social and political breaks: disasters, failures, and disruptions that simultaneously constitute and fracture the world. These breaks range from unsuccessful political movements and acts of resistance to mass incarceration and biopolitical violence, from anti-Black racism to the infrastructural catastrophes of climate collapse. Paul Jaussen shows how poetry responds to such disasters by incorporating public-facing genres and discourses into its literary practice, thereby rewriting into aesthetic form the public languages used to perpetuate or contain that rupture. This poetic integration of public language thus generates a third space, located between the rhetorical and the aesthetic, a literary practice of both world-breaking and world-making that transforms existing genres while also creating newly imagined modes of collectivity. Grounded in contemporary theory and close readings of works by poets such as Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and Ilya Kaminsky, this book proposes that these dynamics require a distinctive critical poetics, one simultaneously attuned to discourses of struggle and discourses of art, modeling a fresh approach to the relationship between politics and literature.

To say that the entirety of human experience can be a novelist’s theme is to voice an absurdity. But, as Peter Swiggart convincingly argues, Faulkner’s work can be viewed as an extraordinary attempt to transform the panorama of man’s social experience into thematic material. Faulkner’s two-dimensional characters, his rhetorical circumlocutions, and his technical experiments are efforts to achieve a dramatic focus upon material too unwieldy, at least in principle, for any kind of fictional condensation.

Faulkner makes use of devices of stylization that apply to virtually every aspect of his successful novels. For example, the complex facts of Southern history and culture are reduced to the scale of a simplified and yet grandiose social mythology: the degeneration of the white aristocracy, the rise of Snopesism, and the white Southerner’s gradual recognition of his latent sense of racial guilt. Within Faulkner’s fictional universe, human psychology takes the form of absolute distinctions between puritan and nonpuritan characters, between individuals corrupted by moral rationality and those who are simultaneously free of moral corruption and social involvement. In this way Faulkner is able to create the impression of a comprehensive treatment of important social concerns and universal moral issues.

Like Henry James, he makes as much as he can of clearly defined dramatic events, until they seem to echo the potential complexity and depth of situations outside the realm of fiction. When this technique is successful the reader is left with the impression that he knows a Faulkner character far better than he could know an actual person. At the same time, the character retains the atmosphere of complexity and mystery imposed upon it by Faulkner’s handling of style and structure.

This method of characterization reflects Faulkner’s simplifications of experience and yet suggests the inadequacy of any rigid interpretation of actual behavior. The reader is supplied with special eyeglasses through which the tragedy of the South, as well as humanity’s general inhumanity to itself, can be viewed in a perspective of simultaneous mystery and symbolic clarity.

"We live in an Enquirer, reality television–addled world, a world in which most college students receive their news from the Daily Show and discourse via text message," assert Charles Blackstone and Jill Talbot. "Recently, two nonfiction writers have been criticized for falsifying memoirs. Oprah excoriated James Frey on her show; Nasdijj was impugned by Sherman Alexie in Time. Is our next trend in literature to lock down such boundaries among the literati? Or should we address the fictionalizing of nonfiction, the truth of fiction?"

The Art of Friction surveys the borderlands where fiction and nonfiction intersect, commingle, and challenge genre lines. It anthologizes nineteen creative works by contemporary, award-winning writers including Junot Díaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Thomas Beller, Bernard Cooper, Wendy McClure, and Terry Tempest Williams, who also provide companion pieces in which they comment on their work. These selections, which place short stories and personal essays (and hybrids of the two) side by side, allow readers to examine the similarities and differences between the genres, as well as explore the trends in genre overlap.

Functioning as both a reader and a discussion of the craft of writing, The Art of Friction is a timely, essential book for all writers and readers who seek the truthfulness of lived experience through (non)fictions.

In the field of negotiation theory, the Harvard Project’s Getting to Yes and Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal occupy polar opposition locations on a spectrum considering distributive and integrative negotiation theories. The Art of Getting More Back in Diplomacy offers case studies from international negotiations in which the author participated that can help illustrate the tactics and theories of each type of negotiation and to make students in law, business, and other fields into better negotiators. Among the case studies are lessons drawn from negotiating denuclearization with North Korea, political reconciliation in Libya, human rights improvements in China, Israel-Palestinian peace processes, and UN negotiations over surveillance, privacy, atrocities prevention, LGBTI rights, and other fundamental freedoms. By illustrating these lessons, The Art of Getting More Back in Diplomacy strengthens the tools that students and teachers of negotiations should have in their negotiating toolbox. Perhaps most importantly, Richardson provides concrete examples of how a negotiator is likely to Get More Back for their clients if they deploy these tactics, rather than having them used against the negotiator.

Autobiographical literature especially reveals the processes by which writers convert their own historical experience into fictional form and suggests how literary forms function in life. This volume defines an original theory of autobiographical writing and provides intriguing analyses of major American works of literature.

The Art of Life examines the transformation of history into literature in Walden, "Song of Myself," Henry James's Prefaces, The Education of Henry Adams, Paterson, and the poetry of Frank O'Hara. These works are approached as events in themselves and are analyzed as conversions of form and history, fiction and fact, and even aesthetics and politics. Thus the work of literature is set in the total experience of living, and the writer is seen not only as an artist but also as a person in a historical, political, and cultural environment. As well as a creator of literature, the writer is viewed as a social, psychological, and biological being.

Chapters on the narcissistic economy of Walden, the mythicizing of history and personality in "Song of Myself," the self-conscious relation that makes the Prefaces of Henry James the autobiography of an artist. the comic perspective of The Education of Henry Adams, and the radical innovation of Paterson and O'Hara's poetry provide new readings of major American works. Each chapter contains some distinct critical insight which not only contributes to, but can be relished apart from, the book's overarching theoretical argument.

The Art of Life is a sophisticated theoretical discussion of autobiography with rich psychological, philosophical, and cultural ramifications.