During his six-year journey across the United States creating the project that became American Geography, Matt Black collected objects in the locations he visited. Each location is designated as an area of concentrated poverty--a US Census definition for places with poverty rates of 20% or higher. Over time, the objects he found and collected began to take on symbolic significance.

As Black crisscrossed the United States, his collection grew into the thousands: plastic spoons and forks, lottery tickets, liquor bottles, lighters, and matchbooks. Some items were important, like job applications, medical paperwork, driver's licenses; some were lost personal effects, like family photographs, bracelets, eyeglasses, notes, and letters. And there was the detritus of labor: work gloves, broken tools and supplies, wire, bolts, padlocks, and bent nails.

This new monograph, presented as a companion volume to Black's seminal photobook, American Geography, presents photographs of these objects, assemblages, and collages, as well as previously unpublished images from American Geography, and the voices of those who are cut off from the American Dream.

These humble, discarded objects form a portrait of America assembled from its roadways and sidewalks, an archaeology of dispossession. For those who follow Black's photographic work and his unflinching critique of inequality in the United States, this book is an essential volume.

When Magnum photographer Matt Black began exploring his hometown in California's rural Central Valley--dubbed the other California, where one-third of the population lives in poverty--he knew what his next project had to be. Black was inspired to create a vivid portrait of an unknown America, to photograph some of the poorest communities across the US. Traveling across forty-six states and Puerto Rico, Black visited designated poverty areas, places with a poverty rate above 20 percent, and found that poverty areas are so numerous that they're never more than a two-hour's drive apart, woven through the fabric of the country but cut off from the land of opportunity. American Geography is a visual record of this five-year, 100,000-mile road trip, which chronicles the vulnerable conditions faced by America's poor.

This compelling compilation of black-and-white photographs is accompanied by Black's own travelogue--a collection of observations, overheard conversations in cafe s and public transportation, diner menus, bus timetables, historical facts, and snippets from daily news reports. A future classic of photography, this monograph is supported by an international touring exhibition and is a must-have for anyone with an interest in witnessing the reality of an America that's been excluded from the American Dream.

In the middle of the Enlightenment Age, Roberto is a sixteen-year-old novitiate caught between two worlds: the monastic life he has been committed to, and the modern world he's forced to leave behind.

Lost in the wilderness of Eastern Europe during a freezing storm, he and his mentor stumble upon Pelekete, a secluded monastery where a small group of monks reluctantly gives them refuge.

The abbey proves to be a strange and ominous place. Whispers carry through the halls. Crows linger on the crumbled cornices like gargoyles. Strange dreams fester in the minds of all who sleep here.

Soon, the dark secrets of Pelekete begin to unravel, thrusting the novitiate into a life-or-death struggle of faith, deception, insanity, and evil.