Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth s Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America s iconic yet oft-neglected  third coast. Soth s richly descriptive, large format color photographs describe an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, his book elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing and reverie.  In the book s forty-six ruthlessly edited pictures, writes Anne Wilkes Tucker,  Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex& The coherence of the project places Soth s book exactly within the tradition of Walker Evans American Photographs and Robert Frank s The Americans. Like Frank s classic book, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. This is the third print run and third new cover of a book which has become one of the most highly collected and widely acclaimed photo-books of recent times.