This dictionary provides a stimulating and categorical foundation for a serious international discourse on design. It is a handbook for everyone concerned with design in career or education, who is interested in it, enjoys it, and wishes to understand it. 110 authors from Japan, Austria, England, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere have written original articles for this design dictionary. Their cultural differences provide perspectives for a shared understanding of central design categories and communicating about design. The volume includes both the terms in use in current discussions, some of which are still relatively new, as well as classics of design discourse. A practical book, both scholarly and ideal for browsing and reading at leisure.

Published in conjunction with the first United States museum retrospective ever devoted to Gutai, exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gutai: Splendid Playground surveys the influential collective and artistic movement. This exhibition catalogue aims to demonstrate the range of bold and innovative creativity present in the avant-garde movement, to examine the aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social, and political context of postwar Japan and the West, and to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse of modern art. Organized thematically and chronologically to explore Gutai's unique approach to materials, process and performativity, this publication investigates the group's radical experimentation across a range of media and styles, and demonstrates how individual artists pushed the limits of what art could be or mean in a post-atomic era. The range includes painting (gestural abstraction and post-constructivist abstraction), conceptual art, experimental performance and film, indoor and outdoor installation art, sound art, mail art, interactive or 'playful' art, light art and kinetic art. Illustrating both iconic Gutai and lesser-known works, this catalogue presents a rich survey reflecting new scholarship, especially on so-called 'late Gutai' works dating from 1965 to 1972.

'A novel that everyone should read before they face their own family Christmas.' The Times When the four Essinger children gather in Austin for Christmas, they all bring their news. Nathan wants to become a federal judge. Susie's husband has taken a job in England. Jean has asked her boyfriend and (once-married) boss to meet her family. Paul has broken up with Dana, mother of their son Cal. But their parents have plans, too, and Liesel, the materfamilias, has invited Dana and Cal to stay, hoping to bring them back together. As the week unfolds, each of the Essingers has to confront the tensions and conflicts between old families and new.

A prank is a "trick, a mischievous act, a ludicrous act." Pranksters such as Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Monte Cazazza, Jello Biafra, Earth First!, Joe Coleman, Karen Finley, John Waters, Henry Rollins and others challenge the sovereign authority of words, images and behavioral convention. "Pranks!" inspired the genre of prank recordings, prank TV, and will delight all lovers of humor, satire and irony.

This fascinating and in-depth biography of Neal Cassady takes a look at the man who achieved immortality as Dean Moriarty, the central character in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." A charismatic, funny, articulate, and formidably intelligent man, Cassady was also a compulsive womanizer who lived life on the edge. His naturalistic, conversational writing style inspired Kerouac, who lifted a number of passages verbatim and uncredited from Cassady's letters for significant episodes in "On the Road." Drawing on a wealth of new research and with full cooperation from central figures in his life--including Carolyn Cassady and Ken Kesey--this account captures Cassady's unique blend of inspired lunacy and deep spirituality.

After having his son kidnapped and suffering other tribulations, a rabbi in seventeenth-century Poland forces a confrontation with the religious and political powers afflicting the people of his faith.

In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen’s novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online. According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were immensely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent. Barchas re-situates Austen’s work closer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott and away from the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work. -- Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Yale University, and author of It

Drawing on comic strip characters such as Buster Brown, Winnie Winkle, and Superman, Ian Gordon shows how, in addition to embellishing a wide array of goods with personalities, comic strips themselves increasingly promoted consumerist values and upward mobility.