In Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race, Rebecca Peabody examines the work of one of the most significant and widely recognised artists working today. Using the art of Kara Walker as a critical site from which ‘to explore how race is constructed and consumed in historical fiction—and in fiction with a history’, Peabody explicates how the consumption of racialised stories of national importance inform our collective memory, as they continue to inform our responses to Walker’s art today. As such, Peabody, as the head of Getty Research Projects and Programs, and a specialist in the fields of modern and contemporary art and African American history, offers the first sustained investigation of the artist’s critical engagement with the practice of telling stories. Best known for her controversial cut-out black paper silhouettes, Walker troubles both the history of art as illustration and the contemporary impulse to ‘read’ images in order to form art historical and visual cultural analysis. This is exemplified in her use of the hard-to-decipher silhouette as an illustrative mechanism, a strategy that renders much of her imagery impenetrable.