"A profound investigation into what makes us human. . . . I have been distracted by this book for several months.”

 

Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

"This is a beautiful book that examines our impulse to look away, a response that is at once instinctive, cultural, philosophical, and morally complex.”

Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span

“It is the precision of how Saltzman has decided to explore just what hides behind each layer of this secondary motion, that gives the content not only a deserving academic nod, but also a human one. . . . [T]he book is perhaps most persuasive for its relentlessly self-reflexive nature. It is honest, empathetic, and even tender at times because of it. . . . For any reader picking this book up, there is enormous value to be found in its unimaginable quantity of incredible reflections. The book is a meditation in seeing through the dimensionality of a single gesture. It is a reminder that refraction, dispersion and reflection produces a spectrum of outcomes."

Lucas Gomez-Doyle | Newcity

"In Turning Away, Benjamin Saltzman examines this human—all too human—gesture as it has been represented from the classical world to modern times. . . . Saltzman has provided a template for reading many a visual image, poem, play, film, and narrative. He shows not only how the gesture of aversion takes place in literary works but also how readers turn away from scenes (while just catching sight of them)."

Kevin Hart | Australian Book Review

"[A] rich and groundbreaking book. . . . Perhaps the most important takeaway from this remarkable book is the insistence of the richly ambivalent nature of this gesture, which can be a pre-conscious reflex or carefully thought through. Now it has been written, there is no excuse for thinking that turning away is a simple gesture with one meaning — indeed, for turning away from the complexity of turning away."

Stephen Cherry | Church Times

“Part art history, part philosophy, all human.”

Typebar Magazine

“This is a writer interested in how people take things in, and what happens when they can’t. . . . Looking away is not an empty reflex or an act of avoidance. It carries meaning. It’s one of the ways people register what they’re seeing when seeing alone isn’t enough.”

Philip Martin | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Endlessly rich, and as imaginative as it is scholarly, Turning Away gives us startlingly new insights into a fascinatingly negative gesture.”

Sianne Ngai, author of "Ugly Feelings"

“Turning away from that which is difficult to watch: it is a moral choice, a spontaneous gesture, a long-standing object of representation. Saltzman explores this entwinement of ethics, aesthetics, and impulse across centuries, in art as well as literature. Composed with an electric blend of writerly elegance and moral urgency, this erudite book compels its readers to keep our eyes fixed on its pages.”

Marta Figlerowicz, author of "Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature"

“Turning Away marks a decisive turn in the whole discipline of visual studies, away from the usual focus on seeing as a positive movement toward objects and spectacles, toward the aversive reflex and its contrary, the deliberate refusal to look. Saltzman complicates our understanding of the visual field as a place of moral attention and leads us into the dark passages of emotional and ethical ambivalence. This is a book that makes a difference, not only in our grasp of human visuality, but in all the mixed feelings of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, thought and feeling that make us the crazy animals we are.”

W. J. T. Mitchell, author of "What Do Pictures Want?"

“In far-flung and compelling examples from art, literature, film, and photography, Saltzman explores a gesture that seems ubiquitous, yet hovers at the edge of meaning. This lavish and virtuosic book finds in the gesture of turning away an entire history of why we turn to art to understand what we cannot look at directly.”

D. Vance Smith, author of "Atlas’s Bones"