Imprint: Tangent
Published: 12/15/2023
Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life[…]
Imprint: Tangent
Published: 07/27/2023
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]
Published: 06/01/2023
Every body contains multitudes, but no body is immune to the ideology of oneness: one true self, one sexuality, one gender, one vision of the world, one true God. For many who identify (or who have been named by others) as transgender, queer, and nonbinary, the refusal to fit within the illusion of one set[…]
punctum books are available at an increasing number of bookstores. Check out the map below where there might be some left! If you are a bookstore interested in stocking our books, you can order them directly through us by sending an email to vincent@punctumbooks.com. Bookstores receive a 40% discount on the list price. We don’t[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/19/2021
“I didn’t even know that was a question I could ask.” That remark from a student in an introductory philosophy course points to the primary body of knowledge philosophy produces: a detailed record of what we do not know. When we come to view a philosophical question as well-formed and worthwhile, it is a way[…]
Figure 1. Tianjin Binhai Library, Tianjin, China In June 2018, punctum and 4 other open-access book publishers in Europe (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and Open Humanities Press) formed the ScholarLed collective: The aim of the collective is to explore the potential of working together. This includes developing systems and practices that allow presses[…]
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[…]
David J. Melnick was born in Illinois in 1938 and was raised in Los Angeles. By the age of 7 he had invented a private language, and at 13 he constructed a semi-private one with a friend. He was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley, and now lives[…]