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[…]

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[…]

Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance

Imprint:

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[…]

The Ruins of Solitude

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

While we conventionally define solitude as the absence of relation, The Ruins of Solitude takes up solitude as a rubric of legible subjectivity that regulates what it means to interact with and make meaning within a material world. Working to imagine an alternative to solitude, the book considers how this mode of embodiment intersects with[…]

On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Winter 2024

In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not get a[…]

Static Palace

Published: 12/01/2022

In the face of unimaginably violent systems, our most vulnerable bodies — sick, disabled, unable to rise from bed — offer the resistance of imperative vulnerability. What can we learn from the body that cannot help but fail? How can porosity perform treachery within entrenched opressions? What kind of reading and relationship to text can[…]

Something More Splendid Than Two

Imprint:

Published: 10/13/2022

Blending literary analysis and memoir, Something More Splendid Than Two is at once an excavation of intergenerational wounds, a dance number, a poem, and a fraught love letter from son to father that disrupts the dominant narratives surrounding the life and myth of Joaquín Murrieta. In the Mexican American imaginary, the legend of Joaquín Murrieta[…]