FORTHCOMING Summer 2026
M.H. Bowker’s Walls is a contemplative essay that is sometimes playful and sometimes grave. At first blush, its subject matter would appear simple. Walls considers (1) the psychic meaning of walls and (2) the meaning of psychic walls. It turns out that these two subjects are intimately and interestingly related, such that meditating on one[…]
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[…]
Imprint: Dotawo
Published: 08/01/2024
The Nubians, the largest ethnic community in Egypt, saw their ancestral homelands disappear beneath the waters of the Nile from the dawn of the 20th century through to 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[…]
FORTHCOMING Spring 2026
In Xenoflesh: Vegan Poetics and Capitalocene Meat, Simon Ryle considers the representation of flesh and meat in an eclectic range of literary texts, artworks, and films produced incipient to and across capitalocene modernity, from Hesiod’s Theogony and Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Encompassing[…]
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, or 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[…]
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[…]