The Floating World by novelist James A. Michener is a classic work on the Japanese print of the Edo period (1615-1868). Mr. Michener shows how the Japanese printmakers, cut off from revivifying contacts with the art of the rest of the world and hampered by their own governmental restrictions, were able to keep their art vital for two centuries through their vigor and determination. For this new edition, Howard A. Link updates the scholarship and expands on many theoretical aspects introduced in Michener's study.

In the far future, an Earth-born woman must negotiate with a fearsome mutant race: “On a par with Ursula LeGuin or Arthur C. Clarke” (Chicago Tribune). Two thousand years into the future, runaway pollution has made the earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus, and the moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the gas planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved. In this unstable system, the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace and ultimately protect her people in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.

This ambitious and groundbreaking publication accompanies an exhibition of highlights from the early ukiyo-e holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Much of Boston's renowned collection of 'pictures of the floating world' (ukiyo-e), an incomparable record of Japanese life, was acquired from the Boston physician William Sturgis Bigelow in the early twentieth century. Subject to a loan restriction since 1928, most of this collection has never before been seen outside Boston. Many of the works have been newly photographed for this catalogue and are hitherto unpublished in this format. Illustrated throughout in colour, this book also features essays, artist biographies and exhaustive catalogue entries by leading scholars examining the stylistic nuances of early masters such as Hishikawa Moronobu and Okumura Masanobu; the techniques used by early ukiyo-e artists; and the history of the Boston collection, 'the finest collection of oriental art under one roof in the world'.

This work discusses the art of the Japanese tattoo in the context of Ukiyo-e, focusing on the parallel histories of the woodblock print and the tattoo.

This book offers an entirely new assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga. Recent changes in Japanese law have at last enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many picture books have since appeared in Japan. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender or power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserve a place in the official history of Japanese art, have dominated, and the question of the use of these images has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in its proper historical contexts of culture and creativity. Sex and the Floating World opens up for us the strange world of sexual fantasy in the Edo culture of eighteenth-century Japan, and investigates the tensions in class and gender of those who made - and made use of - shunga.

Features 300 of Tim Goodyear's movie reviews with hand drawn recreations of the movie's original advertising or VHS box art.