Artificial Intelligence meets Gettysburg. And it is a marvelous pairing. Author Patrick Brennan, a long-time student of the Civil War, published author, and an editorial advisor for The Civil War Monitor magazine, has teamed up with his technology-astute daughter Dylan Brennan to bring the largest Civil War battle to life in striking life-like colors in this remarkable two volume study. Rather than guess or dabble with the colors, as so many do these days, the Brennans used an artificial intelligence-based computerized color identifier to determine the precise color of uniforms, flesh, hair, equipment, terrain, houses, and much more. The result is a monumental full-color study of the important three-day battle that brings the men, the landscape, and the action into the 21st Century. The deep colorization of battle-related woodcuts, for example, reveals a plethora of details that have long passed unseen. The photos of the soldiers and their officers look as if they were taken yesterday. The use of this modern technology has also solved a couple lingering mysteries. It not only helped pinpoint the precise location of one of Gettysburg’s most famous “death” images, but determined that two of the seven “Union” dead depicted were in fact Confederates. As Pat Brennan explains, that may also be a “first” when it comes to Civil War photography: “It was long believed this was an image of seven dead Union soldiers. In fact, only five are Union men. The other two are Confederates. I am still researching the issue, but I believe this may be the only photo we have from the entire Civil War that portrays dead from both sides.” Gettysburg in Color: Vol. 1: Brandy Station to Little Round Top and Vol. 2: The Peach Orchard to Falling Waters, will be out in July 2022 and include nearly 300 photos, paintings, drawings, and woodcuts colorized utilizing the latest in color-recognition software, together with Brennan’s unique digital painting techniques, incredible 3-D maps, and his own extensive research.

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Paramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo's cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes' work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Paramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo's cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes' work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan's Let The Dead concerns itself with life's alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet's adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of 'delicate anthers' and 'disembodied tongues'. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico's shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where 'things in the ground have a tendency to grow.' Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist's responsibility in a time of violence.