Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination

FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

Alone in the Dark is an experimental memoir – or perhaps, more accurately, an anti-memoir or a memoir of the imagination, some unruly combination of essay, prose poem, and floating reverie that examines the relationship between one’s cultural heritage and one’s aesthetic devotions. It initially appears to be an account of the obsessive moviegoing of[…]

Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

FORTHCOMING Winter 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 superhero[…]

Escape Philosophy

Imprint:

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[…]

Cinema’s Doppelgängers

Published: 06/17/2021

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema — or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the[…]

The Event of Art

Published: 09/03/2020

The Event of Art is available as an open-access ebook only (no print edition). The Event of Art presents, in fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, the works of artist Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of[…]