Everything, Beautiful
A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
From the New York Times bestselling author of Eating the Sun and Lost in Translation, a gorgeously illustrated love letter to everything that is beautiful, and a manifesto for those who are struggling to remember or recognize what beauty is
People are increasingly baffled as to what they can call beautiful, what they should call beautiful, and whether or not they are able to apply beautiful to themselves or to the things around them. Our outdated yet hugely pervasive modern notions of beauty provide one of the greatest sadnesses of all—an intensely human emptiness that we are mistakenly trying to fill with objects and hollow promises.
To be able to find our way back to beauty is a deceptively urgent task in the world today. Everyone deserves revelations, the kind that are daily, hugely personal, and very often ephemeral. We are surrounded by beauty—beauty that isn’t something we can buy: spiderwebs only seen in the sunlight, the greenish glow of a fox’s eyes watching in the dark, or the comforting screech of the subway that takes you to your many futures.
Part meditation, part self-help guide, and part interactive journal, Everything, Beautiful explores what beauty is, why it matters, and how we can find it in our everyday lives. Filled with thoughtful, intimate, and brilliant insights, inspirational quotes, breathtaking illustrations, and space for readers to write, draw, and reflect on their own ideas of beauty, Everything, Beautiful is for anyone who feels they cannot point to beauty any longer, are struggling to see it, or feel that it has left them behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It is crucially important that we... find new definitions of beauty that allow us to be fully ourselves, powerfully noticing, and expansively human," contends Orion columnist and illustrator Sanders (Eating the Sun) in this sweet outing. The author advocates finding the sublime in the ordinary and underscores her insights with her own impressionistic illustrations, which include depictions of a family friend's rabbit, a moldy lemon, and a recycling bin. She decries the commercialization of beauty alongside portraits of Edward Bernays, founder of public relations, and marketing expert Ernest Dichter, whose insights into consumer habits she blames for kick-starting the process. "Beauty can be made up of, can come from, anything," she suggests, encouraging readers to ask themselves what qualities cause them to think something's beautiful. She entreats readers to find "small pins of light" even in tragedy, and describes, as well as illustrates, a moment from a video in which two children in Gaza show off a fish they saved in a jar while missiles fire in the background. The full-color illustrations are charmingly stylized, prioritizing mood over realism and successfully evoking the wonder in the banal. The result offers a whimsical and winsome reconsideration of the mundane.
