---

Blanket explores covers in everyday contexts, "New World" colonial encounters, contemporary art, emerging economies, and collecting practices to show how the blanket is not just an object of utility, but one that provides lessons in metaphor, viruses, and secrets.

---

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

We are born into blankets. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness. They shield us in mourning and witness our most intimate pleasures.

Curious, fearless, vulnerable, and critical, Blanket interweaves cultural critique with memoir to cast new light on a ubiquitous object. Kara Thompson reveals blankets everywhere--film, art, geology, disasters, battlefields, resistance, home--and transforms an ordinary thing into a vibrant and vital carrier of stories and secrets, an object of inheritance and belonging, a companion to uncover.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

---

A Note to the Reader
Preface: Convolute

Unfold 1
1. Witness
Unfold 2
2. Folds
Unfold 3
3. Transmission, Extraction
Unfold 4
4. Security
Unfold 5
5. Under Cover
Unfold 6
6. Carriers
Unfold 7

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
List of Figures
Index

---

There is nothing trivial about this little book. It addresses one ostensibly ordinary object - a blanket - but quickly turns your ideas on their heads . Author Kara Thompson traverses a continent of meanings and implications, focusing on various artworks that use some type of blanket motif, or actual blankets, to illustrate metaphorical blankets, especially ones that deal with death. You will appreciate her brilliant analysis of these artworks and their synthesis with themes of colonialism, subjugation, memory, and survival, which is sensitive and detailed. Entwined through the story is a very personal and vulnerable story, in which Thompson wraps these blankets´ abstraction into her individual experience. The book will stay with you for a long time. Seattle Book Review

---

Thompson, Kara
Kara Thompson is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, College of William and Mary, USA. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and the Atlantic.

---