The Miniaturists

In The Miniaturists Barbara Browning explores her attraction to tininess and the stories of those who share it. Interweaving autobiography with research on unexpected topics and letting her voracious curiosity guide her, Browning offers a series of charming short essays that plumb what it means to ponder the minuscule. She is as entranced by early twentieth-century entomologist William Morton Wheeler, who imagined corresponding with termites, as she is by Frances Glessner Lee, the “mother of forensic science,” who built intricate dollhouses to solve crimes. Whether examining Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the Schoenhut toy piano dynasty, portrait miniatures, diminutive handwriting, or Jonathan Swift’s and Lewis Carroll’s preoccupation with tiny people, Browning shows how a preoccupation with all things tiny can belie an attempt to grasp vast---even cosmic---realities.

Korean edition of The Miniaturist: A Novel by Jessie Burton. The book won the 2014 Waterstones Book of the Year award and the author Jessie Burton won the 'new writer of the year' award at the 2014 National Book Awards. From the Back Cover; On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her splendid new home is not welcoming... In Korean. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

An analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world.

* The Believer Book Award Finalist * One of the Best Books of 2012 —BuzzFeed “I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’” First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham. Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.) I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another. "A provocative novel... that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video. The novel is also framed in the world of performance art and is itself its own kind of performance... and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space." —Slate

Bestselling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things—and what small things tell us about our larger world. “[Simon Garfield is] an exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite and delightful factoid.” —Sunday Times (London) Simon Garfield writes books that shine a light on aspects of the everyday world in order to reveal the charms and eccentricities hiding in plain sight around us. After beguiling fans with books about everything from typography to time, from historic maps to the color mauve, he’s found his most delightful topic yet: miniatures. Tiny Eiffel Towers. Platoons of brave toy soldiers. A doll’s house created for a Queen. Diminutive crime scenes crafted to catch a killer. Model villages and miniscule railways. These are just a few of the objects you will discover in the pages of In Miniature. Bringing together history, psychology, art, and obsession, Garfield explores what fuels the strong appeal of miniature objects among collectors, modelers, and fans. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring on us a taste of adult-sized authority. For some, the desire to play with small things becomes a desire to make small things. We live in a vast and uncertain world, and controlling just a tiny, scaled-down part of it restores our sense of order and worth. As it explores flea circuses, microscopic food, ancient tombs, and the Vegas Strip, In Miniature changes the way we perceive our surroundings, encouraging all of us to find greatness in the smallest of things.

From the bestselling author of The Miniaturist comes a captivating and brilliantly realized story of two young women—a Caribbean immigrant in 1960s London and a bohemian woman in 1930s Spain—and the powerful mystery that links them together July 1967, Mayfair, London—a painting left propped on the doorstep of the Skelton Gallery is discovered by Odelle Bastien, a Caribbean immigrant newly employed and in thrall with her enigmatic colleague, Marjorie Quick. The painting is rumoured to be the work of Isaac Robles, whose mysterious death at the burgeoning of his artistic powers has confounded the art world for decades. The excitement over the painting is only matched by the tension caused by the conflicting stories of its discovery. Odelle is unsure whom or what to believe as she finds herself drawn into a complex web of secrets and deceptions. Thirty years earlier, as Spain is on the brink of civil war, Olive Schloss, the daughter of a Viennese Jewish art dealer, follows her parents to Arazuelo, a village in the south rife with unrest. It is here Olive meets Maria Teresita, the young housekeeper, and Maria’s half-brother Isaac Robles, newly returned from the Paris salons, his head full of revolution and dreams of being a painter as famous as Picasso. Both siblings are the illegitimate offspring of the local landowner and have nothing to lose when it comes to exploiting these new guests in their poverty-stricken town. They insinuate themselves into the family, helping to hide Olive’s own artistic talents while Isaac plays at both painting and revolution. The consequences are devastating and echo into the decades to come. In vividly rendered detail, acclaimed and bestselling author Jessie Burton spins a tale of desire, ambition and the ways in which the tides of history inevitably shape and define our lives.

With stories ranging from illustrated fairytales to well-loved nonsense rhymes and books of butterflies, birds and flowers, plus blank books for you to complete yourself, you'll have everything you need to make a little library of beautifully illustrated books. The books are simple to make - just cut, fold and glue. The kit comes with a miniature bookshelf to press out and make, and easy-to-follow, fully illustrated instructions. Plus the box transforms into a beautiful library scene!

In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena. The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that thrums with energy and shimmers with beauty. In “The Artist’s Voice” we meet one of the world’s foremost composers, a man who speaks through his ears. A hijacked plane circles a city for twenty years in “Pilot, Copilot, Writer.” Sound can kill in “The Sounds of Early Morning.” And, in the title story, a man is at war with the wife he accidentally shrank. For these characters, the phenomenal isn’t necessarily special—but it’s often dangerous. In slightly fantastical settings, Gonzales illustrates very real guilt over small and large marital missteps, the intense desire for the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges we feel to defend and provide for the people we love. With wit and insight, these stories subvert our expectations and challenge us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Brilliantly conceived, strikingly original, and told with the narrative instinct of a born storyteller, The Miniature Wife is an unforgettable debut.