Esra Ozyllrek, author of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Specularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey --

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

"Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb take an elegiac look at Rochester, New York. For this project, Alex took images with his last rolls of Kodachrome, a formerly vibrant color film that can now only be processed as black-and-white. The resulting photos have a weathered quality akin to a fading memory. Alex also took to the streets of Rochester and shot in digital color--work that punctuates the black and white work with images from his signature style. Rebecca, who still uses film for all her work, responded to the medium's uncertain future by creating an elegiac refrain of color still lifes and portraits of Rochester women past and present. Woven into the book are quotes by many of the famous writers and thinkers who have been connected to Rochester, including women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and poets John Ashbery and Ilya Kaminsky. And the authors have also created a timeline on the cultural history of the city that traces the evolution of a once-vibrant and now complex city."--

Esra Ozyllrek, author of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Specularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey --

"A dazzling debut novel about resilience, courage, home and family."--Rebecca Stead, Newbery Award-winning author of When You Reach Me SoHo, 1981. Twelve-year-old Olympia is an artist--and in her neighborhood, that's normal. Her dad and his business partner Apollo bring antique paintings back to life, while her mother makes intricate sculptures in a corner of their loft, leaving Ollie to roam the streets of New York with her best friends Richard and Alex, drawing everything that catches her eye. Then everything falls apart. Ollie's dad disappears in the middle of the night, leaving her only a cryptic note and instructions to destroy it. Her mom has gone to bed, and she's not getting up. Apollo is hiding something, Alex is acting strange, and Richard has questions about the mysterious stranger he saw outside. And someone keeps calling, looking for a missing piece of art. . . Olympia knows her dad is the key--but first, she has to find him, and time is running out.

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Longing for a sense of connectedness in spite of an adoring fiancé and impressive education, orphan Phoebe Lange discovers a family scrapbook dating back to the 1920s in which she discovers a terrible secret that triggers an identity crisis. Original.

This book explores the connections between sound and memory across all electronic media, with a particular focus on radio. Street explores our capacity to remember through sound and how we can help ourselves preserve a sense of self through the continuity of memory. In so doing, he analyzes how the brain is triggered by the memory of programs, songs, and individual sounds. He then examines the growing importance of sound archives, community radio and current research using GPS technology for the history of place, as well as the potential for developing strategies to aid Alzheimer's and dementia patients through audio memory.

Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.