Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations, to the natural world and what we imagine beyond. In this thought-provoking and richly textured book, Joseph A. Amato traces the human relationship with surfaces from the deep history of human evolution, which unfolded across millennia, up to the contemporary world. Fusing his work on Dust and On Foot, he shows how, in the last two centuries, our understanding, creation, control, and manipulation of...

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. "The three Sicilies of Joseph Amato's unusual and finely crafted book can be counted, according to its table of contents, as those of fiction, poetry, and social and family history. But they can also be enumerated in another way the homeland of his ancestors, especially his paternal grandmother, a strong but tragic figure whose story frames and focuses the entire volume; the locale of his own travels and experiences, vividly captured in the poems at the center of the work; and the historical and spiritual fountainhead of so much of his own personality and...