Check out 17 prints from famed fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, who died just last month, at Books & Books Miami Beach. Now through June 1.Bassman won acclaim in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast black-and-white portraits of models that had a dreamy quality. In the 1990s, she rediscovered a stash of lost negatives and emerged as a fine-art photographer.A new book of her work Lillian Bassman: Lingerie has just been published. As Ginia Bellafante put it in the New York Times recently, “In place of heavyset women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality.” Fifty years later, these images have lost none of their allure, and the enormous cultural impact of the TV show Mad Men has given them new currency.  1. It’s a Cinch, model: Carmen, Merry Widow by Warner’s, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman  2. Southwest Passage—Sunset Pink, pajamas by Kickernick, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman   3. The Line Lengthens, lingerie by Lily of France, 1955, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman     4. Silo, Bra and Panties, 1948 (advertisement for Firestone Contro elastic yarn), © Lillian Bassman   

Julia Alvarez has been called "a one-woman cultural collision" by the "Los Angeles Times Book Review," and that has never been truer than in this story about three of her most personal relationships--with her parents, with her husband, and with a young Haitian boy known as Piti. A teenager when Julia and her husband, Bill, first met him in 2001, Piti crossed the border into the Dominican Republic to find work. Julia, impressed by his courage, charmed by his smile, has over the years come to think of him as a son, even promising to be at his wedding someday. When Piti calls in 2009, Julia's promise is tested. To Alvarez, much admired for her ability to lead readers deep inside her native Dominican culture, "Haiti is like a sister I've never gotten to know." And so we follow her across the border into what was once the richest of all the French colonies and now teeters on the edge of the abyss--first for the celebration of a wedding and a year later to find Piti's loved ones in the devastation of the earthquake. In A Wedding in Haiti (Algonquin, $22.95), as in all of Alvarez's books, a strong message is packed inside an intimate, beguiling story, this time about the nature of poverty and of wealth, of human love and of human frailty, of history and of the way we live now.