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This collection is a unique publishing event, bringing together three interrelated volumes by one of the most influential and distinguished scholars currently at work in the humanities. In books and essays on painters, sculptors and photographers such as Caravaggio, Manet, Caro, and Wall, Michael Fried has transformed our vision of the stakes of ambitious art from the sixteenth century to the present, while his exceptionally insightful literary-critical work has been enriched by his own practice as a highly accomplished poet. This collection of Fried’s writings is imbued with the distinctive combination of perceptiveness, imagination, and analytical rigour that he has brought to bear on aesthetic artefacts throughout his career. It also serves as a very personal record of its author’s intellectual and critical formation.

The first volume, Exit Interview, features two autobiographical ‘conversations’ that, as well as retracing the development of the arguments and ideas that informed such groundbreaking works as Absorption and Theatricality and Manet’s Modernism, proves wonderfully attentive to both the personal and institutional contexts of intellectual labour. The second volume, The Edge of the Table, is a collection of exquisitely constructed prose poems accompanied by photograms by James Welling. The third and final volume, Selected Essays, places some of Fried’s most recent work alongside selections from his earlier writings. Ranging in topic from Manet to Pollock, Caro, and beyond, these essays exemplify the acumen and aesthetic sensitivity that make their author one of the great critics of our time.