Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World
Description
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 Our outdated yet hugely pervasive modern notions of beauty provide one of the greatest sadnesses of all—an intensely human emptiness that we are mistakenly trying to fill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.
Praise for Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World
Praise for Everything, Beautiful
“Filled with captivating stories, prompts, hand-lettered quotes, and illustrations, Sanders' book expands our perspective to include those imperfect, messy, and even heartbreaking moments in this new definition of beauty.”
–Mindful Magazine
“In a world unspeakably darkened by crisis, it might seem trifling to even think about appreciating, cultivating or devoting our attention to beauty. But perhaps a fuller contemplation of what beauty is, can be and has been is in fact one step toward repairing massive-scale damage. Writer and illustrator Ella Frances Sanders believes it is. In Everything, Beautiful, she envisions learning to see beauty as a curative, even redemptive process . . . No matter how broken our world, it is nevertheless full of ‘tiny, beautiful things,’ she writes. Through text, illustration and guided prompts, Sanders upends and expands our notions of beauty and urges us to notice the ingredients for beauty all around us.”
–BookPage (starred review)
“Sanders advocates finding the sublime in the ordinary and underscores her insights with her impressionistic illustrations . . . She decries the commercialization of beauty and entreats readers to find ‘small pins of light’ even in tragedy. Her charmingly stylized artwork prioritizes mood over realism and successfully evokes the wonder in the banal, resulting in a winsome and whimsical reconsideration of the mundane.”
–Publishers Weekly