FORTHCOMING Winter 2025
“A man dies. He dies because he must—because without his death, there is no story, and, in the end, no history itself.” So starts Nagai’s Imaginary Death, a nonfiction book that examines how an ordinary man born in a small village is unmade and remade into a perfect Japanese Imperial soldier by the era he[…]
FORTHCOMING Spring 2025
In the contemporary West, the elderly are regarded as somehow “other,” no longer who they used to be, no longer full members of the worlds they once inhabited. Being old is seen as a medical management issue. But old age is not a defective version of what preceded it; it is — like childhood, adolescence,[…]
Imprint: Tangent
Published: 04/26/2024
The mask is the classic disguise. But as alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of a[…]
Published: 01/18/2024
In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 10/13/2022
Blending literary analysis and memoir, Something More Splendid Than Two is at once an excavation of intergenerational wounds, a dance number, a poem, and a fraught love letter from son to father that disrupts the dominant narratives surrounding the life and myth of Joaquín Murrieta. In the Mexican American imaginary, the legend of Joaquín Murrieta[…]
Published: 10/22/2020
Can one have something in common with a lava field? Can one identify with a mountain, or connect with a contemporary event in the history of the earth, in the way that some people feel connected together by birthday, genetic fingerprint, or zodiac sign? In the terms of the Christian burial ceremony, what is this[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 07/18/2019
What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 10/16/2018
The Bodies That Remain is a collection of bodies and absences. Through biography, experimental essay, interview, fictional manifestation, and poetic extraction, The Bodies That Remain is a collection of texts and images on the bodies of artists and writers who battled with the frustration of their own physicality and whose work reckoned with these limitations[…]