Masks

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Published: 04/26/2024

The mask is the classic disguise. But as alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of a[…]

Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination

Published: 04/15/2024

Alone in the Dark is an experimental memoir – or perhaps, more accurately, an anti-memoir or fabulist memoir, some unruly combination of essay, prose poem, and floating reverie that examines the relationship between one’s cultural heritage and one’s aesthetic devotions. Unlike a traditional autobiography that details the chronological events of a person’s life, the book[…]

In Defense of Don Giovanni: A Feminist Mythobiography

Published: 03/28/2024

Who wants to champion the figure of Don Giovanni in the time of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo? Don Giovanni is a rapist, murderer, serial seducer, and liar. Can he ever be held up as a role model or seen as a figure to be enjoyed? This is the task that the eminent Italian historian and[…]

Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World

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Published: 03/14/2024

Someone has taken a trip and taken photographs of that trip and someone else has been invited to watch a slideshow of the trip taken. There is a road, there is an abstract painting, there is a viewer who wishes he could live in a televised loop of a sunset, and another who wonders why[…]

Continuum 2: Writings – Scritti – Écrits 2015–2022

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Published: 03/07/2024

This volume gathers Alessandro De Francesco’s essays and theoretical writings produced from 2015 to 2022. It follows the first volume Continuum: Writings on Poetry as Artistic Practice, reuniting essays written between 2007 and 2015. The title of this new volume could only be Continuum 2, given that the underlying concept remains the same: to testify[…]

like a dog

Published: 02/29/2024

Taking its cues from the New Narrative writing movement, like a dog considers how sexual identity is morphed, hidden, and denied by cultural forces like film, pornography, rape culture, and sexual semiotics. The speaker of like a dog writes about her sexuality, sexual trauma, and relationships in the epistolary form to explore how the personal[…]

Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]

The Getty Fiend

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Published: 01/29/2024

The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse[…]