The kernel of a great book in Letters From Black America is clear in its first five entries, heart-rending letters by slaves to the loved ones they had been sold away from.

Imagine: only four of Shakespeare’s plays survive. The rest were destroyed by the Puritans or burned in the Great Fire.

Two years in the life of a ghetto classroom in Hartford, Connecticut and a two-decade long legal suit aimed at ending the de facto segregation of that state’s schools are interwoven in Susan Eaton’s alternately inspiring and heartbreaking real-life tale.

This series of back-pocket-sized books of drawings and photographs ranges widely, from backbiting satire of the art world to images of pursuit of the sublime. In between there are cats, castles in exploding fields, and a gentler but even sadder take on the art world.