Imprint: Brainstorm Books
FORTHCOMING Fall 2025
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
FORTHCOMING Winter 2026
“Why are penetrating questions so much harder to formulate than penetrating answers?” critic Louis Bury asks. Why, indeed. It’s a great question, and also the throughline of Labyrinths: New and Selected Writings. In this collection, Munro formulates penetrating questions (punctums) again and again, and with style and economy. The stories that follow are never reduced[…]
Published: 11/06/2024
Elements of this book, Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes, defy reason. They do so for good reason. Much of what we do, much of what we think, is oblation: sacrifice, offering, to something or someone. The root of “oblation” is “to draw near” or “to dwell in.” It refers to what is brought unto the altar,[…]
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: Brainstorm Books
Published: 01/14/2021
In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/21/2020
In July 1905, in Paris, a young Anglo-French woman called Marie Wheeler became the bride of a Swiss émigré, Johannes Schad. Immediately after the wedding, Marie and Johannes moved to London. And there they lived for nineteen years. In 1924, however, something happened to change their lives, and Marie, in many respects, simply disappeared. Paris[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/27/2019
The term “interest” lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have “disinterested” and “uninteresting,” but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest’s missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/15/2017
My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain. ~ Walter Benjamin “No longer imminent, the End is immanent.” “Ends are ends,” Frank Kermode goes on to clarify, “only when they[…]