Both a love story and a celebration of the warmth and elegance of Iranian culture, A Mirror Garden is a genuine fairy tale of an exuberant heroine who has never needed rescuing. “Captivating.... Farmanfarmaian's sumptuously detailed recollections are a rare, insidery look at two lost worlds.” —Vogue In Persia in 1924, when a child still had to worry about hostile camels in the bazaar and a nanny might spin stories at her pillow until her eyes fell shut, the extraordinary and irresistible Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was born. From the enchanted basement storeroom where she played as a girl to the penthouse high above New York City where she would someday live, this is the delightful and inspiring story of her life as an artist, a wife and mother, a collector, and an Iranian. Here we see a mischievous girl become a spirited woman who defies tradition.

"Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms are filled with a multiplicity of lights that reflect endlessly, projecting the illusion of infinite space. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors traces these installations over five decades, revealing the ways in which they developed from a strategy of "self-obliteration" and political liberation during the Vietnam War to a means of social harmony in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize her pioneering work amidst today's renewed interest in experiential practices"--

“A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it’s a guide to living both in and out of the garden.” —The New York Times Book Review For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.

The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story. A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.

At the turn of the twentieth century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle—“not lost, mind you, but retired.” Jacov’s narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov’s obsession seems increasingly unlikely. From Croatia to Germany, Hungary to Russia, and finally to the Americas, Jacov and his companions grapple with the limits of art, colonialism, and escapism in this antic debut where dark satire and skewed history converge.

Three Principles of Garden of Mirrored Flowers: 1 “The sensations that visitors to the theme park will experience are precisely those that classical Chinese literature has always wanted to convey: life as a bewildering maze. As such, we can better comprehend one of the key principles for the construction of the theme park: bewilder—the soul— intensely.” 2 “In the process of construction, I began to increasingly feel that the process should be an intermittent walk from one area to the next, like how a moving essay is extracted from a grand narrative—this is therefore the second principle of designing gardens: the form may disperse but not the spirit.” 3 "Just like the flower fairies, we have all fallen to earth, having lost our inner equilibrium. As such, no one would turn down the opportunity to enjoy the spiritual release and pleasure that this kind of theme park can offer. Garden of Mirrored Flowers is hence a psychodrama of an even higher class. Therefore, we should be able to understand the third principle for the construction of the park easily: the world's experiential center." Fang's novel tells the story of a man in the process of designing a theme park, called Garden of Mirrored Flowers, and is an adaptation and transformation of the classical Chinese novel Jin Hua Yuan, or Flowers in the Mirror, from the Qing Dynasty. Beginning as a pictorial journey through myriad advertisements and the way they allow for many different entries into reality, Fang depicts parallels between the park's actual construction and how it has been imagined, or how it has evolved out of history. For Garden of Mirrored Flowers is less the vision of one author (Fang) and more the result of reality writing itself through this author; that is, a script, or documentary, of life. “It's a book,” Fang states, “written by a ghost writer. Me? Just a traveler floating within the wave of globalization.” Culminating with the park's opening ceremony, Fang creates a space where history seems to have been completely consumed and absorbed by contemporary social movements. It is both a labyrinth to get lost in and a pavilion made of reflective glass. Hu Fang is a novelist, art critic, and the co-founder and artistic director of Vitamin Creative Space, a project and gallery space dedicated to contemporary art exploration and searching for an independent working mode, specifically geared to the contemporary Chinese context. He lives and works in Beijing and Guangzhou.

So begins one of the most celebrated stories in fantasy literature . . . packed full of mystery, deep themes and incredible prose, meet Severian the Torturer and follow him on his journey across the great world of Urth Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him . . . until he falls in love with one of his victims, a beautiful young noblewoman. Her excruciations are delayed for some months and, out of love, Severian helps her commit suicide and escape her fate. For a torturer, there is no more unforgivable act. In punishment he is exiled from the guild and his home city to the distant metropolis of Thrax with little more than Terminus Est, a fabled sword, to his name. Along the way he has to learn to survive in a wider world without the guild - a world in which he has already made both allies and enemies. And a strange gem is about to fall into his possession, which will only make his enemies pursue him with ever-more determination . . . Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1981 Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1982 Readers can't stop reading The Shadow of the Torturer: 'Full of rich characters and great imagination' Mark Lawrence, author of Red Sister 'A dark jewel . . . He has a mastery of language not often seen in fantasy writing . . . Couple this with an original and unique, highly imaginative and complex worldbuilding and the high praise is warranted' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'This is a picaresque fantasy with a difference, for our hero Severian is no wide-eyed country boy from the shire, but an apprentice torturer, thoroughly schooled in his trade' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'There are certain books that can be considered life-changing experiences. Gene Wolfe is an author who has written one of those for me' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'The Book of the New Sun Tetralogy is one of the great achievements in science fiction and is a MUST READ for fans of the genre. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'In addition to being unique in style, The Shadow of the Torturer is a gorgeous piece of work: passionate storytelling (heart-wrenching in places), fascinating insights into nature and the human condition, beautiful prose' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐