The Case of California (New Edition)

Imprint:

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[…]

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[…]

Fugitive Traces

Published: 09/05/2016

Fugitive Traces is a sound album released in both digital and CD editions* with an accompanying PDF booklet that collages Sackstedster’s voiceover commentary from over a dozen Werner Herzog films with electronic, chamber, and rock music to both pay homage to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers and critique an artistic practice rooted in[…]

Broken Records

Published: 03/21/2016

In 1991, Snežana Žabić lost her homeland and most of her family’s book and record collection during the Yugoslav Wars that had been sparked by Slobodan Milošević’s relentless pursuit of power. She became a teenage refugee, forced to flee Croatia and the atrocities of war that had leveled her hometown of Vukovar. She and her[…]