Surrealism, one of the influential movements of the 20th century, had a profound impact on all forms of culture. Containing over 350 illustrations, this book examines its impact in the wider fields of design and the decorative arts and its sometimes uneasy relationship with the commercial world.

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

IN THE WAKE OF HIS FAILED ATTEMPT TO KILL KING HALIN, PATRIN IS ORDERED NORTH TO SEEK THE HELP OF AN ALLY, BUT THE INCREASINGLY PARANOID AND DISTRAUGHT YOUNG MAN WANTS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS FORMER SAVIOR, THE EXILED PRINCE GALIN ... Suffering from damaged tech, disillusionment and despondency, Patrin and Xadik head west toward Lordingport, where there’s a promise of medicine and new orders from Galin. From Lordingport, they begin a two-and-a-half month journey to Valenkept, traveling through the factionalized collections of warlords and city-states that make up the Boarsland. During their journey, they face constant threats, brutal fights, unforgiving elements and murderous cultists. Pushing through the many physical, tech and moral struggles that arise along the way, Patrin grows increasingly paranoid, questioning whether Galin truly cares for him or whether he’s just a tool that the exiled prince is using to retake the throne. At the same time, Xadik’s outlook grows ever more bleak, as he comes to believe that everything eventually falls to ruin. Will Patrin and Xadik make it to Valenkept and convince King Arbren to back their new assassination plot? Will they make it home? Is there such a place as home?

If you want to discover the fun of collage then this fabulous book is the perfect kit. Collage artist Maria Rivans has gathered hundreds of beautiful, quirky, and downright daft images, and they're all here for you to cut out and stick. Flowers, birds, cats, and butterflies can be combined with buildings, eyes, moustaches, and catalog models in dubious pants to create extraordinary original artworks and talking pieces! Maria provides an introduction to collage styles and tips on technique. An ideal activity for young and old, this book is a perfect gift or self-purchase for anyone seeking arty fun and a great deal of sticky silliness!

We have to find our way back to beauty," writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must "undo" the twentieth century - the age in which the sublime turned from an art category into a technical reality. This leads him to the aesthetical insights of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time. In The Sympathy of Things, the old romantic notion of sympathy, a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, is re-evaluated as the driving force of the aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century. Spuybroek addresses the five central dual themes of Ruskin in turn: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design. He wrests each of these themes from the Victorian era and compares them with the related ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers like William James and Bruno Latour.

In honor of Frank’s 20th anniversary Fantagraphics is re-releasing the massive, long out of print Frank Book omnibus, which collected all the Frank material up to the mid-aughts, including several jaw-droppingly beautiful full-color stories, literally dozens of lushly-delineated black-and-white stories, and a treasure trove of covers and illustrations. The Frank Book also features an introduction by one of Frank’s biggest fans (himself a Frank, or almost): Francis Ford Coppola.

The first monograph to focus exclusively on the three-dimensional works by the Surrealists. More than 50 artists of the period are represented, including familiar names such as Duchamp, Magritte and Picasso, as well as many artists whose striking works are yet to be discovered by a wider public.