Dead Letter Office

Imprint Director: Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy (eileen@punctumbooks.com)

Don’t fear anything for your letters, they are burnt
one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

~ Camille Claudel

. . . it is a fine consolation among the absent that if
one who is loved is not present, a letter may be embraced instead.

~ Isidore of Seville

Dead Letter Office publishes smaller works — minigraphs — of anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 words, representing work that has either has gone nowhere or will likely go nowhere. The emphasis is on the long essay or short book that can find no welcoming harbor because it is too long for a journal and too short for a scholarly press, and yet there are inkdrops of possibility and the darkling shape of a more full-bodied work.

Dead Letter Office also fosters work that never fully “arrives” in all senses of the term: the conference or seminar paper that will never become a finished article, whether too short or too long, the stray pages for a half-baked article that will never become the full-baked article, the half-finished chapter that will never make it into any book, the notes and semi-polished pages for manuscripts that feel unfinish-able, the prospectus for the project you can never seem to find your way to start, the prolegomenon and preamble without follow-up, the stray children of your pen, the letter you wrote then tucked away in a drawer, fearing to mail it, or the one you sent and received again with the stamp “return to sender,” or which was never received nor returned, that you perhaps lost and then re-found.

We also seek experiments in whimsy, in over-reaching, in idle speculation, in prospecting for fool’s gold, in working molehills into mountains, in marking and then forgetting a path in a wild wood of visible darkness. We want articles that are too long for journals and books that are too short to be called monographs. In short, the Dead Letter Office invites you to take your L/letters out of the drawer, or shoebox, or closet, or attic, or hard drive, to re-visit and re-polish, without worrying about conclusions or ultimate destinations, and send them to us. We also invite work whose genre is so un-classifiable, it is often declared “Dead On Arrival” in the more traditional academic publishing houses.

The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.

~ Heather Love

We will also consider actual letters to the dead: belated eulogies, posthumous transmissions to the underworld, love (and hate and other) missives to the departed, funerary telegrams, postcards from the edge, manuals for griefbots, last rites, and various notes and commentaries to be used as devices to water the graveyards where, to cadge from Walter Benjamin, some of the dead are turning by a strange heliotropism toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history.

If interested in submitting a book manuscript to Dead Letter Office, send a query email to Eileen at eileen@punctumbooks.com with a very brief description of the book and we will let you know if we want to see the full manuscript during punctum’s regular open review period, which is May to July each year, and you can see those submission guidelines HERE.

TITLES

Cycle of Dreams

Barge Life: On Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante”

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing

all except you

Notes on Trumpspace: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Fantasy of Home

About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community

Something More Splendid Than Two

Escape Philosophy

The Angels Won’t Help You

Letters on the Autonomy Project

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

Helicography

Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski

Come As You Are, After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

A Bibliography for “After Jews and Arabs”

Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s “Wanda” (1970)

An Edition of Miles Hogarde’s “A Mirroure of Myserie”

Obiter Dicta

Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

The Map and the Territory

A Nuclear Refrain: Emotion, Empire, and the Democratic Potential of Protest

Massa por Argamassa: A “Biblioteca de Babel” e o Sonho da Totalidade

How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound

Paris Bride: A Modernist Life

Misinterest: Essays, Pensées, and Dreams

Sappho: ]fragments

Reiner Schürmann and the Poetics of Politics

Nothing in MoMA

Non-Conceptual Negativity: Damaged Reflections on Turkey

Noise Thinks the Anthropocene: An Experiment in Noise Poetics

Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality

The Bodies That Remain

The Anthology of Babel

Of the Contract

Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida

Philosophy for Militants

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler

Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences

An Unspecific Dog: Artifacts of This Late Stage in History

As If: Essays in As You Like It

CMOK to YOu To

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

Still Thriving: On the Importance of Aranye Fradenburg

Ravish the Republic

Theory is like a Surging Sea

Queer Insists (for José Esteban Muñoz)

I Open Fire

[Given, If, Then]: A Reading in Three Parts

Atopological Trilogy

Minóy

Escargotesque, or, What Is Experience?

The Communism of Thought

The Witch and the Hysteric

The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg

The Non-Library

Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy

Gaffe/Stutter

Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing

A Sanctuary of Sounds

Memoir American

In Divisible Cities

Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing

Traffic Jams: Analysing Everyday Life through the Immanent Materialism of Deleuze & Guattari

Suite on “Spiritus Silvestre”: For Symphony

John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy

What Is Philosophy?

Last Day Every Day

Desire/Love

Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art

The Death of Conrad Unger: Some Conjectures Regarding Parasitosis and Associated Suicide Behavior

Zafer Aracagök, Atopological Trilogy: Deleuze and Guattari (March 2015)

Anthony Adler, The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (January 2014)

Rachael Arrighi, [provisional self-evidence] (September 2015)

Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (December 2012)

M.H. Bowker, Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing (December 2012)

M.H. Bowker, Escargotesque, or, What Is Experience? (January 2015)

Andreas Burckhardt, A Sanctuary of Sounds (May 2013)

David R. Cole, Traffic Jams: Analysing Everday Life through the Immanent Materialism of Deleuze & Guattari
(February 2013)

Alexander Doty and Patricia Clare Ingham, The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (August 2014)

Jeremy Fernando, Jennifer Hope Davy, and Julia Hölzl, [Given, If, Then]: A Reading in Three Parts (February 2015)

Denzil Ford, Suite on “Spiritus Silvestre: For Symphony (December 2012)

Benjamin Hollander, Memoir American (May 2013)

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari (September 2015)

Samuel Ray Jacobson, Notes on Sexuality & Space (Autumn 2015)

Trevor Jones, The Non-Library (March 2014)

Phil Jourdan, John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy (November 2012)

Maxwell Kennel, Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing (June 2013)

Milcho Manchevski, Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art (May 2012)

Adrian Martin, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (October 2012)

Michael E. Moore, Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg (September 2013)

Michael Munro, What Is Philosophy? (October 2012)

Michael Munro, Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy (June 2013)

Michael Munro, The Communism of Thought (April 2014)

Michael Munro, Theory is like a Surging Sea (August 2015)

Joseph Nechvatal, ed., Minóy (June 2014)

Michael O’Rourke, Queer Insists (for José Esteban Muñoz) (December 2014)

Dominic Pettman, In Divisible Cities (August 2013)

David Pol, I Open Fire (December 2014)

Ravish the Republic: The Archives of The Iron Garters Crime/Art Collective, ed. Michael Berger (July 2015)

David Rawson, Fuckhead (September 2013)

Gary J. Shipley, The Death of Conrad Unger: Some Conjectures Regarding Parasitosis and Associated Suicide Behavior (March 2012)

Whitney Anne Trettien, Gaffe/Stutter (October 2013)