My 1980s Gayboy Playlist

FORTHCOMING Winter 2026

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist centers on eight musical works that impacted the author’s sexual and musical awakening as a troubled gay adolescent, including pieces by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Alban Berg, Prince, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Petty. Preferring Alban Berg over Van Halen in the 1980s was a serious aberration in the small Midwestern town[…]

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[…]

Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love

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FORTHCOMING Winter 2025

Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix[…]

all except you

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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[…]

Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant in this volume. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern[…]

Imperial Physique

Published: 11/19/2019

In 2008,  JH Phrydas wrote a story about how bodies talk without words. He wanted the story to not just describe the silent ritual of nonverbal communication but to perform it. The interaction would be visceral – the exchange melancholic, yet full of lust. He wanted words to retain the unsayable: the subtle movements of[…]

Gender Trouble Couplets, Volume 1

Published: 11/15/2019

  Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity radically claimed that the sexed body is a fallacy, discursively constructed by the performance of gender. A.W. Strouse has undertaken to rewrite Butler’s classic tome into an octosyllabic poem. Inspired by the rhyming encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, Strouse transforms each of Butler’s sentences[…]

No Archive Will Restore You

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Published: 11/13/2018

No Archive Will Restore You Listed as a Finalist for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award (Bisexual Nonfiction) and a 2019 Firecracker Award (Creative Nonfiction)! At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, No Archive Will Restore You is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the[…]