Art Books - Anselm Kiefer, Yayoi Kusama and More - NYTimes.com Anselm Kiefer "Schlange (Serpent)," 1982-91, by Anselm Kiefer. We hunger after the otherworldly. We crave magic and interstellar travel, the surreal and the mysterious. We want to savor fear and awe in the same breath, and the high priests of pop culture do their best to keep us sated, whether it's Stephen King, the "Twilight" franchise or "Avatar" in 3-D. But the otherworldly doesn't belong to pulp and movie house alone. It also has its place on the palette of the serious artist, especially since the dawn of the atomic age. Some of the artists here took the 19th-century route and journeyed to the heart of Africa in pursuit of the strange, while others looked to outer space or steeped themselves in alchemy and Kabbalah. Yet others peered so deep into the abyss of their own psyches that they found themselves staring at the back 40 of infinity. As for me, as I gazed at and grazed on the images in these books, I kept hearing Pink Floyd singing, sighing, insisting, "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon." Kehrer. $50. Cosmic winds whistle through this book. The German artist Thomas Ruff lets us squint into the black-granite countertops of deep space, tour the strange yet familiar surface of Mars (no John Carter in sight) and lick our lips at rings of Saturn that look like interstellar parfaits. Mr. Ruff digitally reworked images from NASA, observatories and the Internet to create a book to satisfy the slack-jawed 10-year-old who lives in each of us. YAYOI KUSAMA Edited by Frances Morris 208 pages. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. $49.95. Ms. Kusama was born in the Japanese hinterlands in 1929, and the one big question that's clear in her work is this: How does an artist blossom in the wake of World War II? For Ms. Kusama, one of Japan's best-known artists, the answer was a sharp turn toward sometimes barely decipherable inscapes. She says she makes art "that does battle at the boundary between life and death." In series like Self-Obliteration and Infinity Net it seems that she would like nothing better than to evanesce into eternity. INFRA Photographs by Richard Mosse 136 pages. Aperture Foundation. $50. "Infra" seeks to shed light on the intractable war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to present narratives that, Mr. Mosse writes, "urgently need telling but cannot be easily described." In a brilliant tactic, Mr. Mosse shot these photos using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued military aerial-surveillance film. The infrared film is extra sensitive to green and translates the Congolese landscape into torrid pinks, margarita blues and coral-reef fuchsias. Against this surreal backdrop we see the war more clearly: the child soldiers, the maimed, the dead. ANSELM KIEFER Salt of the Earth By Germano Celant 335 pages. Skira. $80. Gagosian/Prestel. $75. The German artist Anselm Kiefer, a master of dark abstraction, says of his work: "I only accelerate the transformation that is already present in things. That is magic, as I understand it. One of two new books focused on him, "Salt of the Earth" features some 250 works from 1969-2011 that present Mr. Kiefer's obsession with alchemy and Jewish mysticism. "Jerusalem" is from a 2010 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The reproductions are especially sumptuous, the artist's life force pulsing in each brush stroke. IDW Publishing. $125. EC Comics were the funny books that the Mad Men read as teenagers before they inflicted their will on Madison Avenue. EC was smart, funny and gory, and one of its stars was Wally Wood, who was the best reason to read the space operas of Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. Wood was an exquisite illustrator of pulp science fiction, and the stories in this portfolio-size book are reproduced directly from his originals. They feature can-do postwar men, impossibly voluptuous women and a few monsters. Hmm, sounds familiar. Available in comics shops and at idwpublishing.com