What is art education and what should it do? The essays that Steven Henry Madoff has assembled in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) explore this often-controversial question and attempt to determine how to educate people to become professional artists. Madoff is the Senior Critic at Yale University's School of Art. Art School emerges from symposia that he conducted over a five-year period. Thirty prominent artists and educators contributed essays that assess, approve, and in some cases decry the purposes and pedagogy of contemporary formal art studies.

Like contemporary art itself,

As Ernesto Cardenal asserts in Incantations, poetry has a wider latitude for power in a culture where it is understood to be "the first speech." It proposes joyfully that what’s read this afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club shares a magical link to this book's poems by illiterate women in Chiapas. The urgency of such a connection (for them and for us) is what animates for me this inaccrochable collection of poems by Mayan women.

Some history, perhaps? In 1973 Ambar Past, an American woman in her twenties, traveled to Mexico to live in mud huts for thirty years collecting poems and stories in

Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is the world’s foremost creator of “comics journalism”—a contemporary field he basically invented. His previous books, including Palestine—for which Sacco interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict—record, sometimes in minute detail, what is absent from the flash of news reports: the texture of lives on the ground. Sacco doesn’t flinch when depicting some of the most atrocious episodes in recent global history; in Safe Area Gorazde, his extraordinary volume on Bosnia, he presents intricately rendered drawings of mass graves.

Earlier this decade, prompted by a lawsuit his father was facing, photographer Mitch Epstein returned to his western Massachusetts hometown. Holyoke had become an unfamiliar landscape in the years since he had left as a young man, so he decided to document the changed circumstances of his parents’ lives. The resultant photographs and video installations in the series “Family Business” can be understood as an attempt to render visual the tectonic social and economic shifts the United States has undergone since midcentury. American Power, Epstein’s new book, attempts something similar, but on a

Jason Quinn Malott’s debut, The Evolution of Shadows, is a devastating, often dizzying novel of returns and turnarounds. Years after war photographer Gray Banick vanishes in Bosnia, his American, English, and Bosnian friends convene in Sarajevo to solve the mystery of his disappearance, a venture that sends them traveling around the country, seeking hints of him or his remains. Malott’s characters rarely stay in a single timeframe—or a single place—for long: they slip frequently into recollections of lovers and dinners and battles past, making their experience of the present seem just as bumpy,