Asterisks collects thirteen essays that explore literature, cinema, history, and queerness, while persistently returning to the question of how to write, create, and live in a world roiled by fascism and suffering.
Beginning with memories of growing up with a father who was a gun dealer and participating in AIDS activism in the 1990s, Matthew Cheney brings together ideas about violence, oppression, horror, and ideology that get carried into explorations of works by Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Kristine Ong Muslim, Kate Zambreno, James Purdy, Jarett Kobek, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others. Along the way, Asterisks delves into the theater of Charles Ludlam, Battlestar Galactica, the films of Derek Jarman, mass shootings, the art of David Wojnarowicz, and the sentences of John Keene. Asterisks roams and meanders, finding insight in juxtapositions, coincidences, cracks, and margins.
For all of its meanderings, however, Asterisks returns persistently to questions of American violence, queer identity, the fascination with abominations, and the vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Always, Cheney asks: How do we live? What and where is community? And what can art do in a world on fire?
About the Author
Matthew Cheney is the author of About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community (punctum, 2023) and Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), as well as the short story collections Blood (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and The Last Vanishing Man (Third Man Books, 2023), and the novella Changes in the Land (Lethe Press, 2024). Recently, he edited Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (Third Man Books, 2025). He lives in New Hampshire, where he is Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University.
Photo by Amy Wilson.