"Sara Blair deftly blends visual and aural evidence in this multilayered, multisensory journey through the Lower East Side and across several centuries. Blair draws our attention to how creative writers, journalists, photographers, poets, and so many others focused on what they think they saw and heard in that very special, indeed iconic slum." --Hasia R. Diner, author of Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America "The twentieth century saw an explosion of photographic images, and arguably the Lower East Side was its ground zero. Sara Blair spins a virtuoso tale of the effect of this explosion on the creation and perception of place, from its social-cultural roots in anxieties of nineteenth-century immigration and urbanization to its furthest reaches in imagery of nuclear disaster and climate change." --Margaret Olin, author of Touching Photographs "Illuminating at almost every turn, with a telling analytical expressiveness, an utterly persuasive narrative arc, and a tour-de-force impact. No work of art has made it more richly possible to see the usable pasts of the Lower East Side than Blair's book." --Thomas J.

Ferraro, author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America "This is an ambitious, erudite, and richly layered book, one that provides both panoramic breadth and rigorous in-depth analysis. With beautiful prose and great narrative force, Blair shows how the Lower East Side became an experimental space in which new techniques of visualizing and narrating modern America were not only tested but also generated." --Catherine Rottenberg, editor of Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side "In this remarkable book, Sara Blair takes us through subtle and alert readings of Jacob Riis, D. W. Griffith, Paul Strand, Henry Roth, Ben Shahn, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Shteyngart, among others. Exceptionally alert to historical and stylistic differences, to the sense that the Lower East Side itself is always changing and always the same, she constantly returns to the question of time: time lived and time recorded, time as an element in the development of our media and our perceptions." --Michael Wood, author of On Empson.