Publisher's Synopsis
The Book of Emotions is a highly visual, accessible, compendium of thoughts, ideas and provocations about emotions: what they are, what they do, where and how they make themselves felt, how to encounter and navigate them. Rather than offering a single definitive answer to questions like these, the book explores the contemporary landscape of emotion with a light touch, presenting quizzes and questionnaires alongside accessible essays from writers and academics around the globe.
Alongside explorations of ecstasy, empathy and disgust, blushing and transcendence, melancholia and boredom, the book reveals words for emotions that have been ‘lost’ and ‘found’ over the eras. Themes include Noh masks, Franz Xavier Messerschmidts’s startling sculptures of his own contorted expressions, professional mourners, and how ‘anger is the energy’ for feminist art, as well as the history of Emojis.
Quizes and questionnaires reveal how cultures express their emotions in different ways; how artist’s landscapes cause deep sentimental responses, and characters in films express emotions in a single glance. The book offers a route to cast a love spell in thirty-six questions; find out whether the fear of missing out is a brand-new feeling; decide if we should trust our feelings of collective joy; and find that happiness might not be what we are looking for.
Beautifully designed with over a hundred marvellous images: this is a book like no other. Artists and photographers include Jeremy Deller, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Shrigley, Saul Leiter and Vincent van Gogh. The Book of Emotions unpacks our emotional baggage, finds play in our everyday feelings and pleasure where we least expect it.
