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

Forthcoming Titles

Love Don’t Need a Reason: The Life & Music of Michael Callen

Forthcoming

April 25, 1993, Washington, D.C. From a stage erected in front of the US Capitol, Michael Callen surveyed the throng: an estimated one million people stretched across the National Mall in the largest public demonstration ...

Down to Earth

Forthcoming

Can one have something in common with a lava field? Can one identify with a mountain, or connect with a contemporary event in the history of the earth, in the way that some people feel ...

Animal Emotions: How They Drive Human Behavior

Forthcoming

Animal Emotions: How They Drive Human Behavior gives a concise overview about ancient mammalian emotions deeply rooted in the human brain. Jaak Panksepp, a world-renowned neuroscientist from the USA, dedicated his life career to the ...

Testing Knowledge: Toward an Ecology of Diagnosis, Preceded by the Dingdingdong Manifesto

Forthcoming

This volume presents the collective adventure of Dingdingdong, the Institute for the Co-production of Knowledge about Huntington’s Disease, founded in 2012 between Paris and Brussels. Katrin Solhdju’s Testing Knowledge: Toward an Ecology of Diagnosis pursues 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