punctum books – An independent, open-access para-academic publisher

Forthcoming Titles

Something More Splendid Than Two

Forthcoming

Something More Splendid Than Two is a literary memoir that disrupts the dominant narratives surrounding the life and myth of Joaquín Murrieta. In the Mexican American imaginary, the legend of Joaquín Murrieta has been recast ...

Escape Philosophy

Forthcoming

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing ...

A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter

Forthcoming

A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers a unique and personal insight into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation ...

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages

Forthcoming

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions and communications among persons, places, things and ideas in the ...

punctum books is an independent open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

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Testimonials

The release of art and knowledge from enclosure and hoarding into spirited circulation is punctum books’ great work. It is not just that punctum books refuses to reproduce class inequality by making our work free to the desiring. It is also that it is radically open to collaborative, dynamic, rigorous experiments in genre and thought’s forms.

Lauren Berlant

punctum books is the antidote to the Amazonification of publishing that many have been waiting for. But like the actual Amazon forest — and unlike Amazon.com — punctum books is essential for the health of our literary ecosystem. It is the lungs of a certain dispersed, but resonant, creative milieu. And what it lacks in scale, it more than makes up for in energy, enthusiasm, ingenuity, vision, commitment, and — well — joy!

Dominic Pettman

punctum books is conceptually the bravest and aesthetically the most inspiring publisher in the humanities I have encountered to date. And when I refer to aesthetics in this context I do not mean “illustration” of the text but punctum books’ insistence on form as an element of transformation — or simply formation — of semantics rather than its ornamental extension. The open access to their publications is a reflection of the spirit of generosity which offers more than just free books. Generosity is what makes their output a constant risk in experimentation that they take together with their authors. So, it is thanks to their generosity that their catalog seems like an incessant intellectual festival one always desires to return to.

Katerina Kolozova