Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro

"""Four dazzling essays about images, destruction,flowers and invention, forging unexpected links between Agamemnon, archaeology,early photography, explosives, neuroscience, mirrors, Twin Peaks, and -- theauthor's special interest -- sharks. (Did you know that sharks see everything twice?)Melissa McCarthy combines a sharp, precise intelligence with great warmth, witand sensitivity; her brilliant monograph is sure to become a durableclassic."" -- David Collard, author of Multiple Joyce ""In Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro Melissa McCarthy mixesher four headline prefixes in the crucible of her wit to capture the endlessinteractions in nature and art of destruction, flowers, images, and invention.Like Montaigne writing about the destruction of the Aztec empire, McCarthyconstructs her text as a vehicle in which to move across the corpse-strewnwastelands and oceans of human history, gathering together the images thatsurvive and the flowers that unconscionably bloom. The result is anextraordinary feat of quizzical, inquisitive invention, an essay that neverstops moving."" -- Professor Richard Scholar, author of Émigrés: FrenchWords That Turned English ""McCarthy asks, How do we picture the world? Her answeris: Metaphorically, one thing in terms of another, and then another. And so shewrites a beguiling microcosm of a book which, like the 'aleph' of Borges,contains everything: from Agamemnon to algae, from Hiroshima to Hergé, and notomitting the inside of a shark's eyeball."" -- Dr Andy Martin, author ofSurf, Sweat and Tears and Reacher Said Nothing ""From Aeschylus to Jaws, via histories of photography,tattoos, chemicals and some of the most horrific moments of the twentiethcentury, Melissa McCarthy's Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro reads like the reed matsdug up from a Sumerian city: an assemblage of lightly woven textured texts,'crumbling as we try to consider them'. McCarthy approaches writing as a generousreader, as a detective, as a rummager among archives, as an archaeologist, as aphotographic developing agent. The book is suffused with the pleasure oflooking and finding and showing and sharing. McCarthy has a way ofrecalibrating perception, finding the depth in a surface and surfaces in thedepths, helping you to see for just a fleeting moment that perhaps yes a camerais also a coffin, and a shark is also a camera. The result is forensic, joyful,surprising and rich. As McCarthy herself writes repeatedly, 'This is great' and'I love this'."" -- Tom Jeffreys, author of The White Birch: a RussianReflection ""In this sequel to her amazing Sharks, Death, Surfers,Melissa McCarthy shifts the focus to photography and, as its jingle titleadvertises, makes completely new stopovers and connections that indeliblychange how we look at and through the medium. While it participates in what isby now a genre of study of our deep attachment to the vestige, her contributiondoesn't get lost there. By offering rigorous reinterpretation of thephotographic image's posttraumatic temporality (from its lurking latency to itspotent efflorescence, which in the end happens only to recur) McCarthy'sanalysis situates not the history but the essence of the medium within its nearmiss with doubling.""  -- LaurenceRickels, author of Critique of Fantasy"