In addition to essays, artwork and photographs submitted by people around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake contains a piece by Yoko Ono, and work created specifically for the book by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein. “The primary goal,” says the book's editor, a British resident of Japan, “is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. The biggest frustration for many of us was being unable to help these victims. I don’t have any medical skills, and I’m not a helicopter pilot, but I can edit. A few tweets pulled together nearly everything – all the participants, all the expertise – and in just over a week we had created a book including stories from an 80-year-old grandfather in Sendai, a couple in Canada waiting to hear if their relatives were okay, and a Japanese family who left their home, telling their young son they might never be able to return." If you'd like to make a donation to aid the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, please visit the Japanese Red Cross Society website, where you can donate via Paypal or bank transfer (watch out for the fees, though!) or the American Red Cross Society, which accepts donations directed to its Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami fund (but only accepts donations made with U.S.-issued credit cards). And of course, if you like the book, please tell your friends, and tell them to give generously as well! Thank you! Japan really does appreciate your help!

    Award-winning photographer Mark Edward Harris has had rare access to this reclusive country, traveling within its borders as well as documenting life along its northern border with China and the highly militarized DMZ dividing North and South Korea. His images are amazing: the monumental architecture and empty streets of the capital; tightly controlled zones of economic and tourist trade with South Korea; mass games featuring 100,000 choreographed participants. Short essays, extended captions, and a foreword by North Korea expert Bruce Cumings further illuminate a country increasingly at the center of international politics.

    This popular art form is the poetic expression of Zen Buddhism. Traditionally, a haiku poem is just 17 syllables long, which requires the poet, like the follower of Zen, to cut through surface appearances to the heart of an experience. In this collection, translator Jonathan Clements seeks to capture the elusive spirituality that enabled the Japanese poets to preserve their experience of the moment in a mere three lines.

    Happily, Jodi Cobb is able to show us—before they vanish—both the ceremonial world of the geisha in Tokyo and Kyoto and their private world as few outsiders have ever seen it.Many of the older women we meet here were forced into this world by hardship; the young women were drawn to it by their dream of aromantic life or their love of traditional arts. We see geisha in their daytime routines: fine-tuning their breathtakingly lavish wardrobes; perfecting the art of makeup; training maikos (apprentices); and preparing for annual dance performances.But as we watch the geisha at night, as they entertain (for huge sums) at private parties, their art takes a different form. Their purpose is to provide a dream—of luxury, romance and exclusivity. As the men sit at dinner, geisha position themselves at their elbows to serve them sake and delicacies and practice a brilliantly honed art of conversation. As the alcohol flows and the guests relax, geisha play party tricks and sing songs. Geisha have for centuries studied the male ego. They tend it like a garden—and we watch men bloom.This long-hidden world is revealed here both in superlative photographs and in a fascinating text that includes the voices of the geisha themselves. These women have created a life of beauty, making themselves an embodiment of Japanese culture, tradition and refinement—a life that is captured exquisitely in this remarkable book.

    But her mother disapproves, and when they get into an explosive fight, Kimi's entire future seems on the verge of falling apart. So when a surprise letter comes in the mail from Kimi's estranged grandparents, inviting her to Kyoto for spring break, she seizes the opportunity to get away from the disaster of her life.When she arrives in Japan, she's met with a culture both familiar and completely foreign to her. She loses herself in the city's outdoor markets, art installations, and cherry blossom festival -- and meets Akira, a cute aspiring med student who moonlights as a costumed mochi mascot. And what begins as a trip to escape her problems quickly becomes a way for Kimi to learn more about the mother she left behind, and to figure out where her own heart lies.In I Love You So Mochi, author Sarah Kuhn has penned a delightfully sweet and irrepressibly funny novel that will make you squee at the cute, cringe at the awkward, and show that sometimes you have to lose yourself in something you love to find your Ultimate self.

    His influential work spans many practices over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installation work to printmaking. Here, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches, and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, each chapter is dedicated to a major work—whether an album cover, promotional piece, or a personal project—and is presented as a step-by-step working case study. Featuring commentary by Thom Yorke and never-before-seen archival material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. It is a must-have for fans of the band and anyone interested in graphic design and popular culture.

    Describes the principles of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic associated with Japanese tea ceremonies and based on the belief that true beauty comes from imperfection and incompletion, through text and photographs.

    In this e-book you will learn what exactly is needed to run a successful Design Thinking Workshop which is fun and at the same time generates great results. In this e-book Pauline Tonhauser, founder of designthinkingcoach.de, shares her best practices.

    Illustrated with 100 of his paintings, the book is accompanied by an elegant biographical portrait of the artist’s life and achievements.

    Desperate to find where she belongs, she must decide if she has what it takes to start a new life across the ocean. For Yuu Tomohiro, every day is a nightmare. He struggles to control his strange ability, and keeps everyone at a distance so they won’t get hurt—even his girlfriend, Myu. At night, a shadow haunts his dreams, and a mysterious woman torments him with omens of death and destruction. But these haunting premonitions are only the beginning…

    The inspiration of this book is to bring them together, revealing the talents of both the artists and poets in making the obvious seem remarkable, and the everyday seem extraordinary.Works of art from the extensive British Museum collections are matched with a selection of the most celebrated haiku, in both their original Japanese and in sympathetic English translations.David Cobb's introduction and biographical notes on the poets explain the history and development of haiku from earliest to contemporary times.

    She remembers him only in fragments, as an injured artist from whom she and her mother were separated during the war. In her journey, Maggie finds herself at a makeshift pho stall, where the rich aroma of beef noodle soup lures people off Hanoi's busy streets and into a quiet morning ritual. Old Man Hung, the enlightened proprietor of the beloved pho stall, has survived decades of poverty and political upheaval. Hung once had a shop that served as a meeting place for dissident artists. As Maggie discovers, this old man may hold the key to both her past and her future. Among Hung's most faithful customers is Tu', a dynamic young tour guide who works for a company called New Dawn. Tu' leads tourists through the city, including American vets on war tours, but he has begun to wonder what it is they are seeing of Vietnam-and what they miss entirely. In Maggie, he finds a young Americanized woman in search of something quite different, leading him beyond his realm of expertise. In sensual, interwoven narratives, Maggie, Hung, and Tu' come together in a highly charged season that will mark all of them forever. The Beauty of Humanity Movement is a skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption and renewal of love. The story of these characters is tinged with longing for worlds and loved ones lost but also filled with the hope that faith can heal the pain of their shared country's turbulent past. This is the distinct and complex story of contemporary Vietnam, a country undergoing momentous change, and a story of how family is defined-not always by bloodlines, but by heart.

    Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

    The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is Late Summer Entry, a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

    In the decades since, the Star Wars Saga has become a phenomenon impacting cultures across the globe. Just as George Lucas drew upon the work of N. C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell for his own visual inspiration, he has now invited more than 100 well-known and promising artists to draw upon the entire Star Wars galaxy for inspiration. Star Wars: Visions collects these magnificent artworks for the first time. Featuring pieces by renowned artists such as Amano, Allan R. Banks, Harley Brown, Gary Carter, James Christensen, Michael Coleman, Kinuko Craft, Jim Dietz, Phillipe Druillet, Donato Giancola, Ann Hanson, H. R. Giger, Daniel Greene, Ron Kleeman, Arantzazu Martinez, Syd Mead, Moebius, Paul Oxborough, Alex Ross, Anthony J. Ryder, Dolfi Stoki, William Stout, Dan Thompson, Julie Bell and Boris Vallejo, Scott Waddell, and Jamie Wyeth, Star Wars: Visions is a breakthrough tribute to the worldwide inspiration that is Star Wars.Praise for Star Wars Art: Visions:"Star Wars Art: Visions . . . acknowledges what fans have felt all along. They don't want to be mere spectators, but involved in the storytelling too." -Los Angeles Times