Today both truth and entertainment audience our areas of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has basically demolished the twentieth-century wish that such imagery might shock us right into a less alienated condition, or assist in the creation of a just social purchase. What to do now? When to appear, when to carefully turn away?

Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eyesight towards the question of if focusing on representations of cruelty makes all of us cruel. Within a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to actuality Television), the visible towards the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical towards the politics (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a style of how one might balance strong honest convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that lab tests the limitations of flavor, taboo, and permissibility.