Approaching Silence

Water's Edge

Celebrate Native American artist Truman Lowe in this career retrospective featuring 100+ images and intimate insights on his one-of-a-kind sculptures. Published in conjunction with a Smithsonian exhibition—a must-see for fans of contemporary art and Indigenous art Nationally acclaimed artist Truman Lowe (Hoocąk [Ho-Chunk], 1944-2019) was best known for his sculptures that transform wood into water. Working with organic materials such as willow branches and feathers, his artworks evoke the rivers, streams, and waterfalls in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, where he was raised, as well as the history and lived experiences of his family and Hoocąk community. Water's Edge is a stunning retrospective, featuring nearly five decades of Lowe's sculptures, drawings, and paintings. The introduction explores the overlapping themes of moving water, woodland structures, memory and knowledge, and landscape and place that permeate Lowe's work. Essays from scholars contextualize the art within his life, career, and heritage, including the repeated expulsion of the Hoocąk people from their ancestral homeland and their resolve to return. In deeply moving reflections, fellow artists share their connections to Lowe, his influence on their lives and work, and his impact on American art. In addition to featuring his breathtaking work, the book includes lesser known drawings and personal photos of his family and studio to offer an intimate look at his influences and process. Highlighting work that is both innovative and rooted in tradition, Water's Edge is a gorgeous tribute to the evolution of one of the sculpting world's greatest practitioners.

Navigating Deep River

An interdisciplinary dialogue with Shūsaku Endō’s last novel offering new perspectives on Japanese culture, Christian doctrine, Hindu spiritualities, and Buddhist worldviews. In Navigating Deep River, Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton have curated a wide-ranging discussion of Shūsaku Endō’s final novel, Deep River, in which four careworn Japanese tourists journey to India’s holy Ganges in search of spiritual as well as existential renewal. Navigating Deep River evaluates and probes Endō’s decades-long search to find the words to explain Transcendent Mystery, the difficult tension between faith and doubt, the purpose of spiritual journeys, and the challenges posed by the reality of religious pluralism in an increasingly diverse world. The contributors, including Van C. Gessel who translated Deep River into English in 1994, offer an engaged and patient exploration of this major text in world fiction, and this anthology promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endō, within and beyond the West. “This volume contextualizes, delineates, and articulates the complex religious/theological/spiritual dimensions of Deep River and its rich intertextual, interpersonal, psychosocial, and literary aspects. There are few edited volumes in which so many experts focus on a single Japanese text in this sustained manner, and this stands as a model of how to do so deftly and productively.” — David C. Stahl, author of Social Trauma, Narrative Memory and Recovery in Japanese Literature and Film

Essays on English literature [extr. from Études sur la littérature contemporaine] tr. by G. Saintsbury