Imprint: Dotawo
FORTHCOMING Winter 2024
The Nubians, the largest ethnic community in Egypt, have seen their ancestral homelands disappear beneath the waters of the Nile from the dawn of the 20th century until 1964. The massive displacement of this population has been the subject of numerous literary works by Nubian writers who seek to save their heritage from oblivion and[…]
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[…]
Published: 12/08/2020
Reach into this trickbox of memory and rummage around: you may find a tiny spaceship, or perhaps a signpost, a parade, a raised fist, an entire museum. The essays in Trickbox of Memory: Essays on Power and Disorderly Pasts draw on literary criticism, post-qualitative inquiry, new materialisms, and political activism to dismember and reanimate the[…]
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: 03/15/2018
Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed[…]
Published: 06/27/2016
England, 1798. You buy a book of poems. An anonymous volume. You carry it home in your jacket pocket, set it on a table in your sitting room while you munch a midday meal of meat and bread. . . . In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/29/2016
Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes[…]
Published: 02/26/2016
Part scholarship, part journalism, part ecological screed, this book may read like a mashup of critical perspectives. Like other current investigations into the ecological significance of early modern literature, the account of King Lear offered here draws on different and sometimes contrasting interpretive methods: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, literary historicism and what is called the new materialism. Moreover, the book reflects on the broad global setting of eco-materialism’s themes of catastrophe and enmeshed co-existence, using contemporary examples from Japan, New Mexico, Finland, and India, all while jumping back to Shakespeare’s early modern England. … Those interested in ecology might not be interested in the history of Renaissance literacy. And those interested in the scholarship on Shakespeare’s King Lear might not be interested in accounts of tsunami stones or radioactive waste sites. But they should be. … Because the proverbial clock is ticking. What Hamlet said about readiness? Well, it’s happening. The sparrow has already fallen.
~Craig Dionne, Posthuman Lear