The most comprehensive monograph available on the internationally renowned Belgian floral artist and designer Daniel Ost. Daniel Ost's work in floral design gores far beyond table arrangements to bridge the gap between floral design and art. Using elements from the natural world - flowers, branches, and plants of all varieties, Ost crates large-scale, site-specific constructions that at times enter the realms of sculpture and set design. Ost has created exquisite installations for royal residences, embassies, temples, international art exhibitions, and the fashion industry. Daniel Ost presents 80 of his most important projects while accompanying essays explore their significance and the inspiration behind them. Lavish photography illustrates each project in this visually inspiring sourcebook for all creative and design professionals. Texts by Dutch author Cees Nooteboom and Japanese architect Kengo Kuma reflect on the impact of Ost's career.

Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks, "My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story,is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Written in response to and published together with a series of drawings by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, the book draws on Nooteboom's personal reflections--his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares--and presents a set of prose poems that complements and echoes Neumann's work. Full of striking scenes and disturbing images, the poems, driven by the logic of dreams, create the self-portrait of the title.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL One morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man's wife. Yet he is quite certain that the night before he went to sleep as normal in his house in Amsterdam. And so Herman begins a physical journey and a metaphysical adventure, which will re-route him via past loves, through the pangs and pleasures of memory, and to the very heart of that crucial question: 'who am I?'.

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people with its exoticism and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the "typical Japanese." The plan works better than either had imagined in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still ...except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own. This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines. Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless. A novel for those who seek to unravel our mysterious, apparently directionless lives...

A morose provincial inspector of roads in Aragon settles down to write the fable of the Snow Queen. The Netherlands has now been stretched into a vast country with Northern flatlands and hazardous Alpine ranges in the south. Kai and Lucia are circus illusionists, and when Kai is kidnapped, Lucia must rescue him from the Snow Queen's palace. In the Dutch Mountains is an elegantly constructed story within a story, laced with the wit that characterises the work of this outstanding European writer.

Bilingual poetry book: German and Dutch. TWEETALIGE DICHTBUNDEL: Duits en Nederlands. Gedichten van Michael Augustin in vertaling. Gedichte von Michael Augustin (Bremen) in Ubersetzung. Drie vertalers: Martin Mooij, Cees Nooteboom en Hannie Rouweler. Keuze uit eerdere publicaties / dichtbundels. A selection from previous poetry books. Met tekeningen van de dichter (zwart/wit).

Since his first voyage, as a sailor earning his passage from his native Holland to South America, Cees Nooteboom has never stopped traveling.Now his best travel pieces are gathered in this collection of immense range and depth, informed throughout by the author's humanity and gentle humor. From exotic places such as Isfahan, Gambia, and Mali to seemingly domesticated places such as Australia and Munich, Nooteboom shares his view of the world, showing us the strangeness in places we thought we knew and the familiarity of places most of us will probably never see.
His phenomenal gifts as an observer and the wealth of his reading and learning make him an authoritative and delightful companion.
Nomad's Hotel is a record of a world-class traveler's many discoveries and insights.

Roads to Santiago is an evocative travelogue through the sights, sounds, and smells of a little known Spain-its architecture, art, history, landscapes, villages, and people. And as much as it is the story of his travels, it is an elegant and detailed chronicle of Cees Nooteboom's thirty-five-year love affair with his adopted second country. He presents a world not visible to the casual tourist, by invoking the great spirits of Spain's past-El Cid, Cervantes, Alfonso the Chaste and Alfonso the Wise, the ill-fated Hapsburgs, and Velazquez. Be it a discussion of his trip to the magnificent Prado Museum or his visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Guadalupe, Nooteboom writes with the depth and intelligence of an historian, the bravado of an adventurer, and the passion of a poet. Reminiscent of Robert Hughes's Barcelona, Roads to Santiago is the consummate portrait of Spain for all readers.

"An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary Supplement Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, wanders the streets of Berlin, a city whose recent past provides the perfect backdrop for his reflections on life and the universe as he collects images for his latest project - a film that will show the world through his eyes. With his circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Daane discusses everything from history to metaphysics and the meaning of our contemporary existence, often over a hearty meal. Then, one cold winter's day, Daane meets the history student Elik Oranje and his world is turned upside down. And when she unexpectedly leaves the city for Spain, Daane is compelled to follow. All Souls' Day is an elegiac love story, a poignant and affecting tale in which the city of Berlin plays a prominent role, by one of Europe's major contemporary writers. Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty "Displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind" Kirkus Reviews "One of the most remarkable writers of our time" ALBERTO MANGUEL

"Witty and meditative by turns, the overall effect is like being shown around by a wonderfully self-effacing, but impressively erudite guide" The Sunday Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR "Nooteboom has achieved the impossible: to say something new about the ageless city about which everything has been said" ALBERTO MANGUEL "The whole book is the illuminating testimony of a man who cannot look away and so sees things that others, even those with more specialist knowledge, have missed" GREGORY DOWLING, Wall Street Journal VENICE: "A dream of palaces and churches, of power and money, dominion and decline, a paradise of beauty." By the author of Roads to Santiago and Roads to Berlin With this treasury of his time spent in Venice over a period of fifty-five years, Nooteboom makes himself the indispensable companion for all lovers of "the sailing, amphibious city", and for every new visitor. Because he is a master storyteller with an inexhaustible curiosity, and always with a suitcase of books (to which new discoveries are added), he brings vividly and poetically to life not only the tumultuous history of the Republic but along the way its doges, its villains, its heroes, its magnificent painters, its architects, its scholars, its skies, its canals and piazzas and alleyways, and on his expeditions its "bronze voices of time". Those who know and love this city and its literature will recognise Nooteboom - in Laura Watkinson's fine translation - as the dazzling heir and companion to Montaigne, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Ruskin, Proust, Brodsky, and Donna Leon. His homage to Venice is a generous introduction, learned and enchanting, and worthy of its magnificent subject. "His writing is lyrical and densely textured. He is a poet of time and memory" - COLIN THUBRON Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany's baroque cities. With an outsider's objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day.

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.

"A lyrical 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled mosaic" Financial Times "Humane, insightful and deeply cultured" Times Literary Supplement Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, "the island of the wind", and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but "a book of days", with observations about what is immediately around him, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the books it generated, the contempt of Borges for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as a tragedy, but never as farce. 533 is a meditative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events, yet must return to them several times, and sceptically contemplates the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading this book is like having an extraordinary conversation with an extraordinary mind. "The very first pages are so powerful that you suspect the author must have binned the preceding pages that were needed to climb to such heights" De Volkskrant "The 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world" Suddeutsche Zeitung Photographs by Simone Sassen * Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

I had been looking for someone to write to for a long time, but how does a man write letters to a god? From his Mediterranean garden on the island of Menorca, Cees Nooteboom writes to the trident-wielding deity, Poseidon, initiating a dialogue not only with the past, as Alberto Manguel observes in his Preface, but with an entire world that seemed lost for ever. Offering a seductive interweaving of keen observation and the fruits of a vast knowledge, Nooteboom explores questions of human existence through the minutiae of the living world around him, and marvels at the secrets of the deep. He recalls figures in history, places he has travelled to, objets trouves, works of art and literature, and takes a fresh look at the ancient myths. At once playful and poignant, beautiful and bizarre, Nooteboom's Letters to Poseidon are couched in the glittering prose of one of Europe's outstanding stylists.

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has had a long love affair with Spain, a country where he has lived and worked part of each year for several decades. Derived from studies and sketches made between 1979 and 1992, Roads to Santiago is his many-faceted pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, taking in countless digressions through ten centuries of Spain’s history – its politics, its architecture, its landscape and its people. His scholarly curiosity leads him to unravel countless mysteries of the country and to unfold the more obscure riches of Spain. The harvest of so much learning and a long immersion in Spain’s dramatic past and its lively present is a magnificent book. In Roads to Santiago Cees Nooteboom unlocks doors to a Spain we hardly know and which he has discovered through an obsession that has lasted forty years. It is a gracefully written and thought-provoking study of a fascinating land.