Music Book is a 64-page facsimile artist's book by Sarah Cain, comprising a series of colorful abstractions painted directly over a collection of vintage sheet music. The original book of music was found in Switzerland and Cain's paintings within collide with and respond to the previous owner's handwritten notes. Music Book is an extension of Cain's works on paper that balance her installation and large-scale painting practice: these works are intimate meditations; intricate and small-scale. Cain has been painting Music Book since 2008 and has carried it through three studios. It is this journal of time that you can open up, start, close, put away, like a diary. Music Book is co-published by X Artists' Books and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the occasion of Cain's exhibition, Sarah Cain--Enter the Center.

A thoroughly modern woman, Sarah Cain has long disdained her sister's Plain lifestyle. But when news comes of her sister's death, Sarah is stunned to learn she has been named guardian of her children. How can Sarah sacrifice her successful career and a life she enjoys to raise five Amish orphans she barely knows? Besides, Sarah is harboring a secret grief of her own...Will the sorrow that divides them ultimately unite the new family?

exhibition catalogue of Sarah Cain's installations

A year ago, Danny Ryan lost his wife and son in a car accident. He's still reeling from the tragedy when Michael Cohen, his friend and fellow journalist, drives into the pond in front of his house with a bullet through his gut. With Michael's death ruled a murder, Danny must work to get his name crossed off the list of suspects, and that means digging into Michael's last article, an expose of the twisted side of Philadelphia politics. But powerful people are ready to kill to protect what Michael was about to uncover, and if Danny's not careful, he'll be next. The dark heart of the city is on display in Sarah Cain's gripping debut thriller, The 8th Circle.

Philadelphia journalist Danny Ryan is finally getting his life together. Two and a half years after losing his family, he's moved to a new house, started working again, and even began getting close to fellow reporter Alex Burton. Then an old high school acquaintance, Greg Moss, shows up asking for help. He's been getting threatening text messages, and he's not the only one. Other members of Danny's high school class have gotten the same messages, and now they're dead. And then Greg becomes the next victim. Between shady political connections and crooked land deals in his real estate business, Greg had plenty to hide, but it might have been an incident from his youth that led to his death. Now Danny finds himself drawn down the dark corridors of his own life as he tries to put together the lost memories from one fateful high school party all those years ago. But when Danny receives a text of his own, it's a race to find the truth before the killer, much like his own past, can catch up to him in One by One, the electrifying follow-up to Sarah Cain's The 8th Circle.

America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history--the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and traumatic wars--are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation's heritage. Not merely in the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the uncanny and the inexplicable. This stunning catalog, accompanying the first major exhibition to assess the spectral in American art, explores the numerous ways American artists have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible. ​Featuring artists from James McNeill Whistler and Kerry James Marshall to artist/mediums who made images with spirits during séances, this catalog covers more than two hundred years of the supernatural in American art. Here we find works that explore haunting, UFO sightings, and a broad range of experiential responses to other worldly contact.

Cassandra Cain, teenage assassin, isn't exactly Batgirl material...not yet, at least. But with Batgirl missing from Gotham City, can Cassandra defy her destiny and take on a heroic mantle of her very own? She'll have to go through an identity crisis of epic proportions to find out. After a soul-shattering moment that sends Cass reeling, she'll attempt to answer this question the only way she knows how: learning everything she possibly can about her favorite hero-Batgirl. But Batgirl hasn't been seen in Gotham for years, and when Cass's father threatens the world she has grown to love, she'll have to step out of the shadows and overcome her greatest obstacle-that voice inside her head telling her she can never be a hero. Sarah Kuhn, author of Heroine Complex and I Love You So Mochi, takes on one of her favorite heroes for a new audience of readers. Featuring the edgy art style of Nicole Goux, Shadow of the Batgirl tells the harrowing story of a girl who overcomes the odds to find her unique identity.

Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

In Mildred Pierce, noir master James M. Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devasting emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable. Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter.