The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning Audiobook (Free)

Today both actuality and entertainment group our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and battle has all but demolished the twentieth-century wish that such imagery might surprise us right into a less alienated condition, or aid in the creation of the just social purchase. How to proceed today? When to look, when to turn away?

Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this modern predicament, with an vision to the question of if concentrating on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a trip through high and low lifestyle (Kafka to reality Television), the visual towards the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson gives a model of how one might balance strong moral convictions with an similarly strong appreciation for work that assessments the limitations of taste, taboo, and permissibility.