Reaktion Books

Color is a given of most people s everyday lives, but at the same time it lies at the limits of language and understanding. David Batchelor s previous book for Reaktion"Chromophobia"addressed the extremes of love and loathing that color has provoked since classical antiquity. In "The Luminous and the Grey" Batchelor explores similar territory, but charts more ambiguous terrain.
"The Luminous and the Grey" is a study of the places where color comes into being and where it fades away; an enquiry about when color begins and when it ends, both in the imagination and in the material world. Batchelor draws on a wide range of materialfrom neuroscience, philosophy, novels and movies; from the writings of artists and from his own experience as an artist who has worked with color for more than twenty years
After considering the place of color in creation myths, in industrial chemistry, in recent thinking on optics and in the particular forms of luminosity that saturate the modern city, the book culminates in a meditation on the unique color that is also a non-color, a mood, a feeling, an existential condition, and even an insult: grey.
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"Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature--and our deepest human fears."--

A funny, bold and provocative enquiry into what it means to be human.

An animal worshipped, slaughtered, loved and loathed, the mouse is a beguiling part of our culture and environment. Mouse explores in rich detail the stories and history of this enchanting creature, with which we not only share our domestic and urban space, but 99 per cent of our genetic makeup.

A melodious paean to the natural history and symbolic meaning of the most prized, poetized, and mythologized of songbirds. The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and it is also the most mythologized of birds. Nightingale juxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth, and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers, and natural historians-from Aristotle, Keats, and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan-Nightingale charts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale's disappearance from British breeding grounds and the implications this has for nightingale conservation.

The monochrome--a single-color work of art--is highly ambiguous. For some it epitomizes purity and is art reduced to its essence. For others it is just a stunt, the proverbial emperor's new clothes. Why are monochrome works both so admired and such an easy target of scorn? Why does a monochrome look so simple and yet is so challenging to comprehend? And what is it that drives artists to create such works?

In this illuminating book, Simon Morley unpacks the meanings of the monochrome as it has developed internationally over the twentieth century to today. In doing so, he also explores how artists have understood what they make, how critics variously interpret it, and how art is encountered by viewers.