Rakuten Kobo

Signs and Symbols

An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings

by DK, Miranda Bruce-Mitford ...

Series series DK Compact Culture Guides
Since when did certain hand gestures become offensive? And why are scales a symbol of justice?For thousands of years, humans have communicated through a language of signs and symbols. From uniforms to body adornment and corporate logos, symbols are everywhere, and this book is your guide to their secret meanings and history.The Sun as well as the night sky with its stars and planets has long been ... Read more

Was $10.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

Since when did certain hand gestures become offensive? And why are scales a symbol of justice?For thousands of years, humans have communicated through a language of signs and symbols. From uniforms to body adornment and corporate logos, symbols are everywhere, and this book is your guide to their secret meanings and history.The Sun as well as the night sky with its stars and planets has long been
... Read more
The Natural Laws of Story: Master the Art and Science of Engaging Narratives

by Will Raywood ...

Write Stories They'll Never Forget.Why do some stories captivate millions while others, even beautifully written ones, fade into obscurity?In The Natural Laws of Story, writer and scientist Will Raywood takes you on a fascinating journey into the neurological and psychological forces that make stories resonate. Drawing on two decades of expertise and groundbreaking research, he unveils three ... Read more

$3.99 USD

Write Stories They'll Never Forget.Why do some stories captivate millions while others, even beautifully written ones, fade into obscurity?In The Natural Laws of Story, writer and scientist Will Raywood takes you on a fascinating journey into the neurological and psychological forces that make stories resonate. Drawing on two decades of expertise and groundbreaking research, he unveils three
... Read more
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's ... Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors…

by William Shakespeare ...

The present ebook comprises the complete writings of William Shakespeare. It comes with 150 original illustrations which are the engravings John Boydell commissioned for his Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. ------------ Contents: COMEDIES: The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Love's Labor's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of ... Read more

$0.49 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

The present ebook comprises the complete writings of William Shakespeare. It comes with 150 original illustrations which are the engravings John Boydell commissioned for his Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. ------------ Contents: COMEDIES: The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Love's Labor's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of
... Read more
A Dead White

An Argument Against White Paint

by Wendy S Walters ...

Longlisted for the National Book Award in NonfictionAn impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our valuesIt’s hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than ... Read more

$14.99 USD

PRE-ORDER

Longlisted for the National Book Award in NonfictionAn impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our valuesIt’s hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than
... Read more
Art Is Life

Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

by Jerry Saltz ...

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted ... Read more

$4.99 USD

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted
... Read more
Splinters

Another Kind of Love Story

by Leslie Jamison ...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, ... Read more

$14.99 USD

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true,
... Read more
Takedown

Art and Power in the Digital Age

by Farah Nayeri ...

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics.For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to ... Read more

$16.99 USD

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics.For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to
... Read more
In Visible Archives

Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

by Margaret Galvan ...

Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualitiesIn 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the ... Read more

$20.99 USD

Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualitiesIn 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the
... Read more
Picture This

How Pictures Work

Molly Bang's brilliant, insightful, and accessible treatise is now revised and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Bang's powerful ideas—about how the visual composition of images works to engage the emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story—remain unparalleled in their simplicity and genius. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red ... Read more

$12.99 USD

Molly Bang's brilliant, insightful, and accessible treatise is now revised and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Bang's powerful ideas—about how the visual composition of images works to engage the emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story—remain unparalleled in their simplicity and genius. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red
... Read more
Landscapes

John Berger on Art

by John Berger ...

“Essential reading”—n+1Creative and political art criticism on landscape works from the Renaissance to the present from a “master” storyteller (Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things)In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He ... Read more

$9.99 USD

“Essential reading”—n+1Creative and political art criticism on landscape works from the Renaissance to the present from a “master” storyteller (Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things)In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He
... Read more
Swedish Design

A History

by Lasse Brunnström ...

Swedish Design: A History provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the development of design in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.Leading design historian Lasse Brunnström traces the move from artisanal crafts production to the mass production and consumption of designed objects, a process by which the role and profile of the designer became ... Read more

$29.99 USD

Swedish Design: A History provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the development of design in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.Leading design historian Lasse Brunnström traces the move from artisanal crafts production to the mass production and consumption of designed objects, a process by which the role and profile of the designer became
... Read more
Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

by Emily Black ...

A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the ... Read more

$11.99 USD

A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the
... Read more
See/Saw

Looking at Photographs

by Geoff Dyer ...

A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of ... Read more

$12.99 USD

A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of
... Read more
The Design of Everyday Things

by Don Norman ...

**The essential guide to human-centered design“Even more relevant today than it was when first published.”—Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO**Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores ... Read more

$15.99 USD

**The essential guide to human-centered design“Even more relevant today than it was when first published.”—Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO**Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores
... Read more
The synthetic proposition

Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

by Nizan Shaked ...

Series series Rethinking Art's Histories
The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art ... Read more

$20.99 USD

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art
... Read more
Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe ...

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangeme... ... Read more

$12.99 USD

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangeme...
... Read more
The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies

Edited by Gregor Fitzi ...

Series series Routledge International Handbooks
The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines ... Read more

$68.99 USD

The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines
... Read more
Shapely Bodies

The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France

by Christine A. Jones ...

Series series Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, ... Read more

$36.99 USD

Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup,
... Read more
Seeing Differently

A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts

by Amelia Jones ...

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a ... Read more

$51.99 USD

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a
... Read more
Making Disability Modern

Design Histories

Edited by Bess Williamson, Elizabeth Guffey ...

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role ... Read more

$28.99 USD

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role
... Read more
The Grand Valley

by Morgan Meis ...

Series series Three Paintings Trilogy
In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human ... Read more

$10.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human
... Read more
Things Worth Keeping

The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World

by Christine Harold ...

A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce wasteRampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects ... Read more

$17.99 USD

A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce wasteRampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects
... Read more
The 99% Invisible City

A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

by Roman Mars, Kurt Kohlstedt ...

**A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, USA TODAY, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER“[A] diverse and enlightening book . . . The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.”—The New York Times Book Review**“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t ... Read more

$16.99 USD

**A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, USA TODAY, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER“[A] diverse and enlightening book . . . The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.”—The New York Times Book Review**“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t
... Read more
Like Love

Essays and Conversations

by Maggie Nelson ...

A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artistsLike Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects ... Read more

$12.99 USD

A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artistsLike Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects
... Read more

eReaders

Apps

Accessories

Shopping Cart

You're getting the VIP treatment!

Your Shopping Cart is empty

Available:

1 audiobook monthly

+ FREE 30-day trial

Available:

1 audiobook monthly

+ FREE 30-day trial

Recommended For You

Criticism eBooks

Show: