“Mike Allen will infect your subconscious with hallucinatory and alarming delight. This book is a must-read for fans of weird fiction and dark fantasy.” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One who Comes After The Spider Tapestries, Mike Allen’s sophomore short story collection, takes a wrecking ball to genre boundaries, showcasing seven stories that mix transhuman noir, Lovecraftian horror, and surrealistic sorcery in an exploration of the further reaches of the Weird. Readers who savored the disorienting strangeness in Allen’s debut collection Unseaming, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and Amazon.com horror fiction bestseller, will find The Spider Tapestries begins where Unseaming left off. As Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, explains in her introduction, “Allen outdoes himself even further, borrowing and synthesizing across genres with gleeful abandon....This results in stories like ‘Twa Sisters,’ with an atmosphere and setting as if Heironymous Bosch had been brought in as a consultant on Blade Runner. Or ‘Sleepless, Burning Life,’ which, with simultaneous nods to steampunk and metaphysics, explores and upends the familiar trope of Mortal Chosen by the Gods.” More praise for The Spider Tapestries “Elegant language and surrealistic themes defy genre and moral expectations in the weird and transgressive stories found in this collection... Allen’s pairing of individualistic suffering and cosmic hugeness evokes a lyrical friction between dread and wonder.” ­— Publishers Weekly “The seven stories in this slim collection range from dark fantasy to sf to horror—sometimes all within one tale. There are enough spiders here to make an arachnophobe go into hysterics, but they are not the only ones spinning webs ... Allen weaves intriguing connections among his tales, applying dizzying, sensual images.” ­— Library Journal “The aptly named Spider Tapestries forms a stunning picture that is equal parts darkness and light . . . a whirlwind tour through worlds of decadent fantasy, noir-touched future-weird, and elegant horror. Mike Allen offers up intricate mythologies that feel real and lived in, rich-detailed stories for readers to immerse themselves in, and from which they will emerge changed. The stories feel epic in scope, from an assassin climbing through the clockwork gears of the world to rescue a goddess in a cage, to an AI moving through bodies and networks to gather up and reassemble the pieces of his lost love. Allen takes readers on a journey through years and worlds, all in the space of a few pages.” —A.C. Wise, author of The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again “There was a time before the marketplace sliced our wild fantastic literature into bite sized chunks, a time when visions could be astounding, amazing, and weird all at once, a time when Clark Ashton Smith could mainline a Thousand and One Nights into million-colored suns. Now comes Mike Allen, shredding raw that scar-woven shroud between then, now, and infinity, releasing hallucinatory torrents of jewel-encrusted erotic transhumanism with the intensity of a quasar and stripping bare the secret wheels and cogs of the universe beside those lovers who would destroy them.” —Scott Nicolay, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Do You Like to Look at Monsters? “Mike Allen, among the most dynamic of contemporary fantasists, habitually upends Lovecraftian tropes with his own brand of cosmic horror.” —Laird Barron, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of X’s for Eyes

Louise Bourgeois' tapestry and needlepoint work deals with reparation in both a literal and metaphorical sense. In many of the works, fragmented tapestries are pieced together and repaired to create new sculptural forms. The recurring practices of weaving, stitching and mending express Bourgeois' identification with her childhood and the family business of tapestry restoration. Coupled with the medium of tapestry, Bourgeois' recurring motif of the spider symbolizes her mother, a weaver, and fully explores the complex relationship between mother and child. This publication includes archival photographs and facsimile documents from the Bourgeois family archive, as well as excerpts from the artist's psychoanalytical writings.

Award-winning creators, Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault, present a picture book biography of a beloved artist in Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, Maman, stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise’s own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois’s childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works. With a beautifully nuanced and poetic story, this book stunningly captures the relationship between mother and daughter and illuminates how memories are woven into us all. “With evocative, gorgeous illustrations and an inspirational story of an artist not often covered in children’s literature, this arresting volume is an excellent addition to nonfiction picture book collections, particularly those lacking titles about women artists.” —Booklist, starred review

This book of poetry—written by a retired university professor who was deafened during childhood—reveals the challenges, defeats, and triumphs of living in a world that often ignores those who live and struggle in silence and who are cut off from access to communication and information. Filled with words of longing, poignancy, resiliency, spirituality, and love, the author uses a tapestry as a metaphor to illustrate how all those challenges have come to be woven into one whole fabric of a meaningful life.

Previous ed. published in 1997 under the title: The loom of God: mathematical tapestries at the edge of time, by Plenum Press.

"Ball takes us on an inspiring journey into the depths of nature, encompassing all the sciences, in which we discover that broad and elegant principles underpin the formation of the countless beautiful patterns around us."--Inside jacket.

As Germany launches a successful invasion of England during World War II, American historian Mary Wooler, her warrior son Gary, and Ben Kaman, a Jewish refugee, become caught in the middle of the conflict as a dark conspiracy threatens to destroy the very fabric of time itself.

Navajo blankets, rugs, and tapestries are the best-known, most-admired, and most-collected textiles in North America. There are scores of books about Navajo weaving, but no other book like this one. For the first time, master Navajo weavers themselves share the deep, inside story of how these textiles are created, and how their creation resonates in Navajo culture. Want to weave a high-quality, Navajo-style rug? This book has detailed how-to instructions, meticulously illustrated by a Navajo artist, from warping the loom to important finishing touches. Want to understand the deeper meaning? You'll learn why the fixed parts of the loom are male, and the working parts are female. You'll learn how weaving relates to the earth, the sky, and the sacred directions. You'll learn how the Navajo people were given their weaving tradition (and it wasn't borrowed from the Pueblos!), and how important a weaver's attitude and spirit are to creating successful rugs. You'll learn what it means to live in hózhó, the Beauty Way. Family stories from seven generations of weavers lend charm and special insights. Characteristic Native American humor is not in short supply. Their contribution to cultural understanding and the preservation of their craft is priceless.

Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.

Once upon a past. . . . Millie had been a ghost for 800 years. But now, restored by the magic of Xanth, she was again a maddeningly desirable woman. She could have had any man she wanted . . . except the one she did want, Jonathan the zombie. To grant Millie her desire, and to prove his right to rule Xanth in the future, young Magician Dor embarked on a quest for the elixir which would restore Jonathan to full life. But the potion could be found only in the past . . . so, through a magic tapestry, to the past he went, taking over the body of a barbarian warrior. The first person he encountered there was Jumper, a giant spider—a nightmare monster, but a staunch friend and much-needed ally in peril-haunted, ancient Xanth. Then Dor met Millie—800 years younger, but just as lovely. And he realized that, in his new body, he was no longer twelve years old . . .