The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing

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Published: 06/19/2024

The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing is about writers navigating the unspeakable through image, sound, and structure. Each chapter focuses on a specific text, exploring the ways that four writers look to visual and auditory materials and metaphors as passageways to understanding and expressing the ineffable qualities of relationships, identity, and[…]

Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience

Published: 05/28/2024

If you tried speaking with a dead person and they gave you a clear response, how would you react? Mediums develop their minds and bodies to communicate messages from the deceased to their living loved ones, and in Speaking with the Dead, anthropologist Matt Tomlinson describes his experiences training as a medium with a Spiritualist[…]

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[…]

Xenoflesh: Vegan Poetics and Capitalocene Meat

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

In Xenoflesh: Vegan Poetics and Capitalocene Meat, Simon Ryle considers the representation of flesh and meat in an eclectic range of literary texts, artworks, and films produced incipient to and across capitalocene modernity, from Hesiod’s Theogony and Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Encompassing[…]