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

Forthcoming Titles

Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods

Forthcoming

What does it mean to "speak for the social" in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to ...

dis/cord: Thinking Sound through Agential Realism

Forthcoming

dis/cord is an experiment in reading sound. Embarking from Karen Barad’s early work on agential realism, it diffracts quantum physics through sound art, finding the sympathetic resonances that allow them to speak together. dis/cord believes ...

The Angels Won’t Help You

Forthcoming

The Angels Won’t Help You is a book about the uniqueness and primacy of help, particularly in relation to care, love, and caritas. It relies heavily on psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts of help and care ...

Abruptly Dogen

Forthcoming

In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Here are some of his pith writings—startling, shifting, funny, spilling out in ...

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