Autotheory and Its Others

FORTHCOMING Winter 2026

Ever since Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts gave the word fresh currency a decade ago, autotheory has infiltrated scholarly, literary, and artistic practices. Yet Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism is the only book on the topic to appear so far. Autotheory and Its Others, the field’s first multi-authored essay collection, contributes[…]

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[…]

The Dream-Slaves

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Published: 09/28/2024

To fight the gods—you must first become a slave. Our universe is dead. All that’s left are memories. But the powers indigenous to the new world are fighting back. Alexander, a handsome immigrant fleeing trouble in his poor native land, doesn’t even have a claim to his own name in the magic-rich city of Norio,[…]

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[…]

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

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FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

“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 question by looking at a mythical classic of French[…]

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[…]

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[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2: The Contest between B-Genres

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Published: 11/24/2020

In The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in[…]