Madonna's book Sex (1992) is the world's largest-grossing illustrated book, selling 1.4 million copies worldwide and earning US$70 million in sales at retail. This essay is the first to use methods from the discipline of bibliography to analyze the book's production, distribution, and reception. This article extends scholarship on Madonna, including about her iconicity and visuality, from her songs and videos to her print culture. I demonstrate how Sex – both as a printed book and as an expression of national culture – is part of a dynamic American book history that constructs notions of America, including freedom of speech, thought, and religion.

This essay analyzes how various memorials create physical, temporal, and literary space for reflection about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As a New York Times reporter, Amy Waldman contributed in 2001 to the “Portraits of Grief” before publishing in 2011 The Submission, her novel about the memorial-building process. Juxtaposing Waldman's fiction and journalism with the Reflecting Absence memorial in New York and Columbia University's 9/11 Oral History Project, the essay explores how memorialization of the attacks can build space for democratic debate rather than just a public monument to the idea of national grief.

This essay seeks to review the edges of Eric Lott's Black Mirror. But to approach the inner and outer edges of “a black mirror” is to sense the threat that they could become two sides of the same coin. In chapter 1, “Black Mirror: State Fantasy and Symbolic Surplus Value,” Lott writes, “we should explore the dimensions and especially the consequences of the fantasy race is – consequences that suffuse the consciousness of class, sexuality, gender, and other lines of force. Live there a while, in thought as in life. That is what this book tries to do.” To take up this invitation is therefore to first locate that space which readers are asked to live in for a while. However, to near that territory is not to enter the fantasy of race, if only to critique it, for we are already there. Nor is it accessed by abandoning the value of race, Lott contends, especially while the economy of whiteness continues profiting from “black symbolic capital.” Here we encounter the daunting scope of a “black mirror,” where horizon lines become Fata Morganas: an area that covers “the mechanics, dispositions, and effects of the dominant culture's looking at itself always through a fantasized black Other” (xvii). The dimensions of that mirror prove wider still, as any race, gender or class is shown capable of reflecting itself in it. More specifically, Black Mirror questions how signs of racial difference might possibly divest from the dominant symbolic economies in which they are exchanged, except Black Mirror largely does so by demonstrating their reinvestment. When analyzing the fantasies, angles and contradictions of a “black mirror,” readers are compelled to seek its outer edges, a market with real use-value, spaces where gifts are exchanged, or a beyond alluded to as “occupying the tain of the mirror – the mirror's tin backing that allows it to reflect at all” (20).

Something about the way the South looks has long fascinated outsiders and southerners alike. It seems to invite the stunning cover of William Eggleston's The Beautiful Mysterious, which is a blue-tinged, illuminated, nearly empty, parking lot. Another example: the “rust aesthetic” associated with the banged-up signs so common in William Christenberry's photographs seems like an authentic southern thing. In fact, a certain orange-brown, rustlike color permeates many of the photographs in The Beautiful Mysterious. A more shocking visual signifier of southernness has historically been the lynched black body, as, for example, that of Emmett Till in 1955. As it turns out, Eggleston (b. 1939) grew up in Sumner, MS where the murderers of the Chicago teenager were put on trial – and acquitted.