Color surrounds us: the lush green hues of trees and grasses, the variant blues of water and the sky, the bright pops of yellow and red from flowers. But at the same time, color lies at the limits of language and understanding. In this absorbing sequel to Chromophobia—which addresses the extremes of love and loathing provoked by color since antiquity—David Batchelor charts color’s more ambiguous terrain. The Luminous and the Grey explores the places where color comes into being and where it fades away, probing when it begins and when it ends both in the imagination and in the material world. Batchelor draws on neuroscience, philosophy, novels, films, and artists’ writings—as well as his own experience as an artist working with color—to understand how we see and use colors. He considers the role of color in creation myths, industrial chemistry, and optics, and examines the particular forms of luminosity that saturate the modern city. Following this inquiry into the hues that we face every day, he turns to one that is both color and noncolor: grey itself, which he reveals is as much a mood, feeling, and existential condition as a shade that we experience with our eyes. Deftly argued, always thought-provoking, and ever entertaining, The Luminous and the Grey is a beautiful study of how we see and feel our multicolored world.

Batchelor coins the term "chromophobia"--A fear of corruption or contamination through color--in a meditation on color in western culture. Batchelor analyzes the history of, and the motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. He argues that there is a tradition of resistance to colour in the West, exemplified by many attempts to purge color from art, literature and architecture. Batchelor seeks to analyze the motivations behind chromophobia, considering the work of writers and philosophers who have used color as a significant motif, and offering new interpretations of familiar texts and works of art.

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, it belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, gray measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it may also be the spectral medium of literature itself—that grainy gas of language. Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation—registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett. Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.

"Of course I worry. What if the cops witness a cat opening a skylight and masterminding a robbery? The tabloids will love it." There's a new pair of thieves in MolenaPoint, California, a renegade yellow-eyedtomcat with a cold disdain for the law,and a scruffy human partner who isno better. The two, clever and silentat their work, are bad news indeedto crime-solving cats Joe Grey andDulcie. But when Joe learns the pair'sconnection to a good friend, and then an innocent couple turns up dead in the library garden, Joe and Dulcie must engage in some fancy paw work to unmask the deceptions and route the real killer -- before his brazen criminal crime spree careens madly toward them.

From the author of Crown of Coral and Pearl comes an immersive new fantasy about a witch who must learn to harness her power — or risk losing her loved ones forever. Liora has spent her life in hiding, knowing discovery could mean falling prey to the king’s warlock, Darius, who uses mages’ magic to grow his own power. But when her worst nightmare comes to pass, Darius doesn’t take her. Instead, he demands that her younger sister return to the capital with him. To make matters worse, Evran, Liora’s childhood friend and the only one who knows her secret, goes missing following Darius’s visit, leaving her without anyone to turn to. To find Evran and to save her sister, Liora must embrace the power she has always feared. But the greatest danger she’ll face is yet to come, for Darius has plans in motion that will cause the world to fall into chaos — and Liora and Evran may be the only ones who can stop him.

Artist Alex Grey is creating some of the most beautifully refined paintings in the world today and his work is exhibited worldwide, including the New Museum and Stux Gallery in New York, the Grand Palais in Paris, the São Paulo Biennial, and ARK exhibition space in Tokyo. His art is also featured in venues as diverse as album covers for the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Tool, Newsweek magazine, and the Discovery Channel. This is a limited collector’s edition which contains: • One hardcover copy of Sacred Mirrors • One hardcover copy of Transfigurations • Portfolio of six new paintings suitable for framing • The protective case acts as an altar • Contains over 250 color paintings

The most extensive collection of Grey’s visionary artwork and life’s journey in one volume • Includes a foreword by Albert Hofmann and essays on Grey’s work by renowned art critic Donald Kuspit, philosopher Ken Wilber, and Stephen Larsen, author of Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind • 21,000 sold in hardcover since October 2001 Every once in a great while an artist emerges who does more than simply reflect the social trends of the time. Such an artist is able to transcend established thinking and help us redefine ourselves and our world. Today, a growing number of art critics, philosophers, and spiritual seekers believe that they have found that vision in the art of Alex Grey. Transfigurations, the follow-up to Grey’s Sacred Mirrors (1991)--one of the most successful art books of the 1990s--includes all of Grey’s major works completed in the following decade, including the masterful seven-paneled altarpiece Nature of Mind, called “the grand climax of Grey’s art” by Donald Kuspit. His portrayals of human beings blend anatomical exactitude with visionary depictions of universal life energy. Alex Grey’s striking artwork leads us on the soul’s journey from material world encasement to recovery of the divinely illuminated core.