Afzal Ahmed Syed holds a unique place among contemporary poets of the Urdu language, as an acknowledged master of both the classical and modern Urdu poetic forms. The poems in Rococo and Other Worlds explore the mythology and historical realities of South Asia and the Middle East; their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young observer of the violent separation of East Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. Musharraf Ali Farooqi's sensitive translations bring this extraordinary work to English readers for the first time.

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture. This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste. The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

Finalist for the Baileys Women's Prize Annie McDee, thirty-one, lives in a shabby London flat, works as a chef, and is struggling to get by. Reeling from a sudden breakup, she’s taken on an unsuitable new lover and finds herself rummaging through a secondhand shop to buy him a birthday gift. A dusty, anonymous old painting catches her eye. After spending her meager savings on the artwork, Annie prepares an exquisite birthday dinner for two—only to be stood up. The painting becomes hers, and Annie begins to suspect that it may be more valuable than she’d thought. Soon she finds herself pursued by parties who would do anything to possess her picture: an exiled Russian oligarch, an avaricious sheikha, an unscrupulous art dealer. In her search for the painting’s identity, Annie will unwittingly discover some of the darkest secrets of European history—and the possibility of falling in love again.

In late nineteenth century Lucknow, two rival story-tellers, Syed Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar, wrote a fantasy in the Urdu language whose equal had not been heard before, and which has never been rivalled since. It was called Tilism-e Hoshruba. The writers claimed that the tale had been passed down to them from story-tellers going back centuries: it was a part of the beloved oral epic, The Adventures of Amir Hamza which had come to the Indian subcontinent via Persia and had gained in popularity during the reign of Akbar, the Mughal emperor. The Tilism-e-Hoshruba is the subcontinent’s first wholly indigenous Indo-Islamic fantasy epic. It tells the stories of Amir Hamza’s military forces, his grandson and his loyal band of tricksters (masters of wit and disguise) as they go to war with Afrasiyab, the sorcerer who rules the magical land of Hoshruba. Fantasy, the occult, adventure and romance play themselves out in a typically Indian setting as wizards, sorceresses, tricksters and royalty pitch themselves into the battle for Hoshruba. The characters of the epic are marvels of literary creation, and are much more colourful and dashing than those of the Amir Hamza cycle of tales. The Tilism-e Hoshruba runs to twenty four volumes and will be translated into English for the first time ever by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, the acclaimed translator of The Adventures of Amir Hamza. Random House India will publish all the volumes starting with Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism, i.e. Book 1 of the series.

Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.

Among global environments, the undersea is unique in the challenges it poses – and the opportunities it affords – for sensation, perception, inquiry, and fantasy. The Aesthetics of the Undersea draws case studies in such potencies from the subaqueous imaginings of Western culture, and from the undersea realities that have inspired them. The chapters explore aesthetic engagements with underwater worlds, and sustain a concern with submarine "sense," in several meanings of that word: when submerged, faculties and fantasies transform, confronting human subjects with their limitations while enlarging the apparent scope of possibility and invention. Terrestrially-established categories and contours shift, metamorphose, or fail altogether to apply. As ocean health acquires an increasing share of the global environmental imaginary, the histories of submarine sense manifest ever-greater importance, and offer resources for documentation as well as creativity. The chapters deal with the sensory, material, and formal provocations of the underwater environment, and consider the consequences of such provocations for aesthetic and epistemological paradigms. Contributors, who hail from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, include scholars of literature, art, new media, music and history. Cases studies range from baroque and rococo fantasies to the gothic, surrealism, modernism, and contemporary installation art. By juxtaposing early modern and Enlightenment contexts with matters of more recent – and indeed contemporary – importance, The Aesthetics of the Undersea establishes crucial relations among temporally remote entities, which will resonate across the environmental humanities.

"As the present volume offers six translations from the qissa genre, it is useful to understand the nature of the qissa genre; or rather, qissa's non-genre nature. In Urdu, the word qissa is used for both short and long narrative literature. It encompasses works in both prose and verse. When looking at narratives that belong to qissa literature, one is struck by their diversity. These narratives include everything from folk literature, to historical narratives, to adventure tales, picaresque narratives, comic and tragic stories, accounts of pilgrimage, and religious texts. Their structure varies from frame and interior stories, to linear narratives, to collections of disparate tales, joined loosely together. Each such narrative enriches the possibilities of the qissa, while at the same time making it more difficult to describe the genre neatly. Stories must have played a paramount social role in a society for it to create such a profusion of narratives meant for narration and retelling. Did the qissa literature grow from an impulse to give a story-like structure to every narrative? This diversity of texts published as qissas certainly suggests that. This extraordinary engagement with stories at a social level becomes clearer when we take a closer look at the qissas and realize that a number of them have a function beyond idle entertainment. To their audience, they offered everything, from social guidance, physical well-being, and moral training. The qissas were meant to be life's finishing school. The riches of this literature can be sampled in the six qissas presented here in their first English language translation"--

The Great Artists introduces readers to 100 of the world's most important artists, from the 13th century to the present, concentrating on their lives, works, ideas, influences, artistic development, contributions, creative output and where they fit in history. Concise and readable, The Great Artists is an interesting, informative and authoritative history of 700 years of fine art for the general reader. Writing with verve and passion, Susie Hodge presents, in chronological order, elegant and often affectionate biographical profiles of 100 of the greatest artists in the history of art. The biographies not only describe the life, development and creations of each artist, but also set these visual composers and their compositions within a broader historical and cultural context. Furthermore, shortlists of 'must-see' masterpieces for each artist give the reader all the information they need to appreciate and understand great art. From the great artists of the high renaissance art to the Dutch maters, and from the rococo and neoclassical movements of the 18th century to romanticism, modernism and contemporary art, the lives of the great artists are as varied and multifaceted as the works of creative genius they produced. A selection of featured artists includes: Mantegna, El Greco, Pissarro, Turner, Seurat, Bellini, Caravaggio, Leighton, Constable, Mucha, Botticelli, Rubens, Manet, Ingres, Klimt, Bosch, Gentileschi, Degas, Géricault, Munch, da Vinci, Poussin, Whistler, Corot, Kandinsky, Grünewald, Velazquez, Homer, Hiroshige, Matisse, Dürer, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Delacroix, Mondrian, Michelangelo, Steenwyck, Monet, Millet, Malevich, Raphael, de Hooch, Rodin, Courbet, Klee, Titian, Vermeer, Renoir, Bouguereau, Marc, Holbein, Canaletto, Gauguin, Rossetti, Picasso, Bronzino, Hogarth, van Gogh, Millais, Hopper.