Imprint: Dead Letter Office
FORTHCOMING Winter 2024
The Presence of Absence 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 ineffable qualities of relationships, identity, and grief. The book explores absence and excess,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/27/2023
“I cover Steinberg with adjectives, which are like vibrations—multiple, rapid—that this lively oeuvre arouses in me.” Roland Barthes’s consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 — is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes’s oeuvre to be[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/19/2023
Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home. ~ Trump Tower advertisement In the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, considerable ink was spilled on the architecture and interior design of the buildings owned and inhabited by Donald J. Trump. In an effort to understand the inner workings of America’s[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/06/2023
Why write? Why ask a reader to give their time and attention to your words? How can writing be more than narcissism and self-aggrandizement? These questions were ones that the writer and naturalist Barry Lopez asked at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the summer of 2000, and they are questions at the heart of[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
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[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
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[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/22/2022
The Angels Won’t Help You is a book about the uniqueness and primacy of help, particularly in relation to care, love, and caritas. It relies heavily on psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts of help and care and finds that help requires the establishment of a real relationship between persons, where help is given and received in[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/02/2022
In the face of rising authoritarianism and on the heels of urgent struggle, autonomy calls to us. How might we excavate the theory and history of autonomous politics to arrive at new possibilities for radical democracy and the radical imaginary? How can we rethink the ways in which artistic autonomy is theorized and practiced beyond[…]