Modern art, filled with complex themes and subtle characteristics, is a wonder to view, but can be intimidating and baffling to the casual observer. In this accessible, practical guide, Jon Thompson analyses more than 200 works of modern art, describing each artist's use of media and symbolism to help the reader unlock the painting's meaning. The book also offers biographical information on all the featured artists.

Filled with photographs of unpopulated studios, Paul Winstanley's exploration of British art schools highlights their importance at a time when the art school system's existence is more fraught than ever. For this series, Winstanley (b.1954) photographed undergraduate studio spaces in more than 50 art colleges across the United Kingdom over the summers of 2011 and 2012. These rough-and-ready, nearly neutral spaces are photographed as found; empty in the period between school years. Collectively, the works highlight the abstraction of the interiors with their temporary white walls, paint stains, neutral floors and open spaces. Photographed in this manner, their sterile nature is juxtaposed with their intended purpose of fostering intense creativity for a future generation of artists. Over 200 full-colour illustrations - which combine images from various schools to form their own abstract space - are accompanied by writings from two professors of fine art: a text by Jon Thompson and an interview with the artist by Maria Fusco. To commemorate the publication, Winstanley created a limited-edition digital print from the Art School series. Each edition is hand-finished by the artist and contained within a custom-made slipcase containing a signed copy of the book.

Organized around three sequences of numbered tercets, Notebook of Last Things maps a city undergoing dynamic, transformative change along with the sense of living that change—its rhythms and patterns, its peculiar commitments, its urgencies and pleasures as well as its inequalities, tensions, and fateful “unsaids.” Possessed by the drama of the ephemerality of experience, tuned into the drift of the present, Notebook of Last Things draws on the lyric to meditate on the present, and the powers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that make it up. “Notebook of Last Things is written in dialogue with (or in counterpoint to) Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History and his/her/its “unreadable tally of catastrophe.” Thompson has an eagle eye for the rips and fissures destroying our social fabric, for the discrepancies that seem ironic and then reveal themselves as tragic, the “Art Deco walkway over the beltline/[ with a] Chain link fence to discourage jumpers.” In the quality of his attention, he could be a minimalist version of Ron Silliman or a Basho-inflected George Oppen. His steady gaze is well worth following.” —Rae Armantrout

"In Strange Country Jon Thompson addresses the voices, amongst others, of 'the traffic of fear', and bids their speakers join the living. It is also an invitation to the reader to enter a specifically American poetry of the here-and-now. The accomplishment of Strange Country begins with the exact measure of its line and its discovered idiom in the face of what may well be termed the present contradictions of a strange country. What sustains that accomplishment is a poet's attention to a 'wide-open polyphony' equal to the multiple realities of its subject." - Kelvin Corcoran

Otherworldly, uncanny, melancholy, there like the past, like the present, the place (not the people) remains: a glimpse, a flicker, a trick of light that excavates the dark, the endless accretion of shadows. What is to be found there? "Desire like a dream of paradise." Ekphrasis is rarely this eclectic, this moving. - Eric Pankey

Studies in Classic American Literature [...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the relationship between the Old World and the New, a new theory of the self, a theory of textuality (and a fearless demonstration of a radical, self-styled form of psycho-social criticism), a theory of art, a history of America, a critique of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest covert autobiographies in world literature (all the writers in the book represent either versions of Lawrence's self or versions of himself he felt he had to liberate). And, of course, it is a bravura interpretation of "classic" American texts, one of the most innovative and penetrating critical performances of modern times. -from Jon Thompson's Introduction.

'After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing' lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's 'Of Plymouth Plantation', Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener', Walt Whitman's 'Specimen Days', Emily Dickinson's 'Letters' and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches', 'After Paradise' offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary history, After Paradise attempts to restore a sense of the original strangeness of American literature and culture by pushing the boundaries of the essay form.

Loosely based upon photographs of Occupied Japan, THE BOOK OF THE FLOATING WORLD ranges across a war-ravaged landscape, from a shattered Tokyo to scenes of a depleted countryside, with a close examination of the lives constructed out of that ruin. THE BOOK OF THE FLOATING WORLD explores the photographed moment-and poetry-as a peculiar and arresting instance of witness. Threaded throughout this collection is a set of interrelated meditations upon history, violence, war, memory, and art itself. First published in 2004, THE BOOK OF THE FLOATING WORLD is offered here in a new edition, complete with all the original photographs of Japan during the American Occupation-- the starting point for Jon Thompson's elegiac poetry. In their clarity and openness, these photographs frame the struggle between old and new identities taking shape in the postwar era. This new edition of THE BOOK OF THE FLOATING WORLD represents a ground-breaking collaboration between the visual and the literary in a format that traces the hidden connections between past and present.