In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, The Great Image Has No Form explores the "nonobject"--a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.

Francois Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters' deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with the Western notion of art as...

Working simultaneously on two levels, "Saladin" represents the best kind of biography a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin s military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Edde s narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of...