Mirrors Of The Unseen

A fascinating journey through the cultural and artistic landscape of Iran, both past and present, by the New York Times bestselling author of An Unexpected Light In our current climate of war and suspicion, Iran is depicted as the "next" rogue nation that America and the world must "deal with." But the rhetoric about nuclear weapons and jihad obscures the real Iran: an ancient nation and culture, both sophisticated and isolated, which still exists clandestinely in major cities as well as the country's remote mountains and deserts. Jason Elliot has spent the last four years traveling in Iran, and in this remarkable book he reveals the many sides of the culture, art, architecture, and people that Westerners cannot see or conveniently ignore. Part close reading of symbols and images, part history, and part intimate interviews with Iranians of many different kinds—from wealthy aristocrats at forbidden parties to tribal horsemen in the most remote mountain villages, who have never seen a Westerner—Mirrors of the Unseen is a beautiful and thought-provoking book by one of the world's most acclaimed adventurers and authors.

This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine – prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.

Islamic architecture has enriched design with a wide variety of structural shapes, including among others, unique arches, a wide variety of vaults and domes which allow for new forms to be developed. The influence that these structural forms have in non-Islamic countries was one of the themes of the 3rd International Conference on Islamic Heritage Architecture and Art, at which the included papers were presented. There is much to learn from past experiences to arrive at solutions which are environmentally sound and sustainable in the long term. As conventional energy resources become scarce, the Islamic design heritage can offer invaluable lessons on how to deal in an efficient manner with cases of hard and extreme environments. Traditional architecture and urban environments in most Islamic countries are now being eroded by overemphasis on a global type of architecture and city planning. As a consequence, many regions are losing their identity. It will become increasingly important for new developments to take light of what the classical Islamic urban designs and architectures have to offer modern society. An equally important aspect covered is the analysis of the materials employed and the types of structural elements, particularly those unique to Islamic architecture. Preserving this heritage requires the development of appropriate conservation techniques in response to the different materials used and the ways structural forms work, including under extreme conditions, such as earthquakes. These papers deal with the design of many types of buildings in Islamic countries, including not only the better known public buildings like mosques, mausolea, citadels and forts, but also houses and gardens, engineering works such as bridges and dams, irrigation systems and many others which have also had a profound impact on society.

An elegant, page-turning thriller in the vein of Night Film and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, this tautly crafted novel is about stories: the ones we tell, the ones we keep hidden, and the ones that we’ll do anything to ensure they stay buried. When literary agent Peter Katz receives a partial book submission entitled The Book of Mirrors, he is intrigued by its promise and original voice. The author, Richard Flynn, has written a memoir about his time as an English student at Princeton in the late 1980s, documenting his relationship with the protégée of the famous Professor Joseph Wieder. One night just before Christmas 1987, Wieder was brutally murdered in his home. The case was never solved. Now, twenty-five years later, Katz suspects that Richard Flynn is either using his book to confess to the murder, or to finally reveal who committed the violent crime. But the manuscript ends abruptly—and its author is dying in the hospital with the missing pages nowhere to be found. Hell-bent on getting to the bottom of the story, Katz hires investigative journalist John Keller to research the murder and reconstruct the events for a true crime version of the memoir. Keller tracks down several of the mysterious key players, including retired police detective Roy Freeman, one of the original investigators assigned to the murder case, but he has just been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Inspired by John Keller’s investigation, he decides to try and solve the case once and for all, before he starts losing control of his mind. A trip to the Potosi Correctional Centre in Missouri, several interviews, and some ingenious police work finally lead him to a truth that has been buried for over two decades...or has it? Stylishly plotted, elegantly written, and packed with thrilling suspense until the final page, The Book of Mirrors is a book within a book like you’ve never read before.

"Aware of the risks involved, but determined to explore what he could of the Afghan people and culture, Elliot leaves the relative security of the capital, Kabul.

In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form. From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends

Undead is part one of a three part series, called The Z-Files, following the lives of Tyr and Persephone before and during the years that the undead plagued humanity and spread across the earth. Theses two have lead very different lives and gain very different powers throughout the course of the story, and yet they are connected in the most sacred and carnal of ways. Tyr gains powers that transforms his body into something born from the very myths and legends that spawned the creation of the Undead. Persephone develops love for her knew family, for her lover and for herself, all of which were feelings that were foreign and strange to her before meeting them. Power and love seem like wonderful things, but these two heroes soon learn the weight that these offer in such a dark world, yet it is the love between them that remains the truest form of power.

A philosophical perspective on the relation between Paul Klee’s art and his thought. The artist Paul Klee once said that “art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” In Klee’s Mirror John Sallis examines the various ways in which Klee’s art makes visible things that ordinarily go unseen. He shows how Klee’s art is like a mirror capable of reflecting not only the surface appearance of things, but also their hidden depth and the cosmic setting to which they belong. Tracing the relation of Klee’s paintings and drawings to music, poetry, and philosophy, Sallis also takes account of Klee’s own extensive writings, both theoretical and autobiographical, and of the incisive lectures that he presented while teaching at the Bauhaus. Featuring large, high-quality reproductions, Klee’s Mirror shows how the painter’s theories both are exemplified in his art and, in turn, are enhanced and extended by what his art achieves and reveals. “Klee’s Mirror is a masterful interpretation of one of the most inspiring artists in the Western tradition, one that will surely capture the interest of philosophers, art history scholars, as well as students and lovers of Paul Klee’s works.” — Alejandro A. Vallega, author of Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political “Paul Klee mused in his diary that his art was a kind of mirror whose aim was not ‘to reflect the surface’ but rather ‘to penetrate inside’ such that, for example, his ‘human faces are truer than the real ones.’ In his exquisite new study, Sallis takes up the complex question of Klee’s mysterious mirrors. On the one hand, Klee’s works themselves are mirrors of truth, making visible, Sallis tells us, ‘what otherwise remains invisible,’ reflecting ‘what lies beyond the visible surface of things.’ On the other hand, Klee’s own theoretical writings are extraordinarily articulate and they uniquely mirror his artistic work. Klee’s paintings are not, however, illustrations or representations of Klee’s ideas. The mirror of Klee’s painting demands a new kind of reflective writing. Finally, there is the mirror of Sallis’ own work, deftly navigating between Klee’s brilliant double mirror play, producing in turn a startlingly and innovative mode of writing that twists free of the dualism of sensibility and intelligibility.” — Jason M. Wirth, author of The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time