Barge Life: On Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante”

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Published: 07/03/2025

Waves washing up against the hull, a bed and a small stove, the deck hatch sealed shut — the vessel is the ultimate dwelling. How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these questions by looking at a mythical classic of French[…]

Queer Finitude

FORTHCOMING Fall 2026

What if intimacy wasn’t defined by identities, couples, or other congruencies, but by incongruity and the seemingly empty moments of anonymity and solitude? In this compelling final volume of his trilogy on “the intimacy of the Outside,” John Paul Ricco articulates the aesthetics and ethics of finitude, exploring how the ordinary limits of our bodies,[…]

Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image

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FORTHCOMING Winter 2026

What do images have to do with the stubborn perception that women are naturally and fundamentally mothers? How can artwork aligned with feminism teach us to see women differently? In Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image, Kimberly Lamm explores these[…]

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[…]

Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Published: 08/24/2023

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the[…]

Escape Philosophy

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Published: 07/14/2022

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether. The physical body has often been seen as[…]

A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter

Published: 09/08/2022

A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about[…]