Coming from Yale University Press, July 2026​    Preorder

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From an award-winning writer, a personal and critical meditation on vision and re-visioning.

 

When Carousel: An Essay on Seeing opens, a professor has just begun delivering a slide lecture to a darkened classroom: 

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"It's the audience that allows a performance to begin. Every limit is a set of controls. Who is speaking? Not 'I' anymore, an angle without audience, but a marionette, a woman elsewhere, everywhere else, everywhere strung into a frame."

 

Across short, immersive sections masterfully fusing the slide lecture and the lyric essay, Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings, Instagram reels, and drone warfare. Blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.