This Brilliant Darkness - A Book Of Strangers

As a journalist suddenly skeptical of the power of words to tell the deepest truths of other people's stories, Jeff Sharlet turned to taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram-images that he then reflected on in words of extraordinary intimacy and power. A visionary work of radical empathy, this collection of images and reflections is framed by the two years between his father's heart attack and his own, a time defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers: night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless and the lost (or merely disoriented), addicts and people on the margins.

A book that erases all boundaries between author and subject and reader, between the "safe" and the afflicted, This Brilliant Darkness is a riveting, light-bearing inquiry into the ways we live with suffering.