Amidst the magical girls and sentient robots that dominate the Japanese graphic novels and comics known as manga, pockets of intrigue and eroticism lie.
Books
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Endless Enemies: Photographing Military Training Targets around the World
A 30-year-old memory of a metal figure riddled with bullet holes, standing in the furrows of a German field, finally persuaded photographer Herlinde Koelbl to investigate what military training targets look like around the world.
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A Contemporary Codex Teaches Children About Migration
Migrant appropriates the vertical, accordion-bound form of a pre-Colombian codex to tell of a Central American family’s freight train journey to the United States.
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Tales of Japanese Spirits Give Form to Our Deepest Fears
Have you ever had a supernatural experience, a moment unexplained by reason or logic that left you feeling as if a mysterious force was present?
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The Troubled, Creative Lives of Almost Famous Women
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s short-story collection Almost Famous Women, I admit, would have caught my attention simply by its title, as I have an insatiable fascination with eccentric women in history.
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A Portal to Unite the Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books Collection
This month the Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books Collection launched an online platform that unifies artists’ books from across several Smithsonian collections.
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Lamenting the Demise of the Culture Class, Again
I can’t remember being so deeply frustrated by a book that I assumed I would like and find informative.
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A Book that Judges You by Your Cover
We’re used to judging books by their covers — but perhaps we’d think twice about our premature judgments if books judged us back.
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A Look at the California Publishers in the 2015 LA Art Book Fair
LOS ANGELES — They said it would never work. They said Angelenos aren’t interested in art books. Then, two years ago, they were proven wrong.
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Letters of Woe and Curses Returned with Stolen Pieces of the Petrified Forest
The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
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Language as Maternal
George Oppen published his first book, Discrete Series, in 1934; his second, The Materials, emerged 28 years later, in 1962. But even Oppen and Bunting were raring to go in comparison to Wong May, whose third collection of poems, Superstitions, came out in 1978.
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Topless but Far From Helpless: Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Life
So-called revisionist art history has made room for numerous, formerly overlooked or ignored artists in Western Civ’s recognized canon, but what is that establishment narrative to make of a big-boned Southern gal who played avant-garde cello in the nude while submerged in a Plexiglas tank filled with river water?
