Tension and Invention

How friction, diversity, and tension drive breakthrough ideas in business, technology, and cultureIn the popular imagination, innovation is associated with the lone genius. Innovation, however, is never the product of one individual, but rather occurs through the combined efforts of a network of ...

Matters of Sex

Chronicles the pioneering reformer whose 1920s study of female sexuality ignited America's first sexual revolutionDecades before Alfred Kinsey released his famous “Reports” on human sexuality, Katharine Bement Davis conducted a pioneering study of female sexuality. Published in 1929, Factors in t...

Northern Comfort

Traces New England’s rich baking tradition with historic recipes, carefully adapted for the modern kitchenIn the wake of the American Revolution, a culinary style formed that would set the standard for American cooking. In Northern Comfort, acclaimed food historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fit...

Lesbian Feminist Killjoys

How lesbian feminist theories of sex illuminate public anxieties about sin, guilt, and innocenceStereotyped as manhating, puritanical killjoys, lesbian feminists have drawn almost as much contempt as the conservative Christian movements to which they are compared. Rather than dismissing this nega...

Conceiving Asian Babies

Exposes the racial hierarchies in how human eggs are marketed and soldConceiving Asian Babies offers a compelling and timely exploration of race, identity, reproduction, and capitalism within the industry of human egg donation. Far from being a purely medical or personal matter, egg donation serv...

Direct Democracy Rules

An essential guide to understanding how citizen lawmaking reshapes state immigration policySince 2010, state legislatures have enacted 1,644 statutes and resolutions regarding immigration, averaging about 329 laws each year. Nevertheless, the most controversial bills, the ones we remember and tal...

Mama, Don’t You Weep

How Black maternal grief sustains, resists, and remakes Black lifeIn 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to display her son’s brutalized body transformed private mourning into public activism, establishing a paradigm of "grief capital." In Mama, Don’t You Weep, Rhaisa Kameela Williams interrogates...

Hot Fruit

Hallucinatory, evocative, and surreal in its own idiosyncratic way, Hot Fruit is Erinrose Mager’s long-awaited debut volume. Strange and incantatory, Erinrose Mager’s debut collection Hot Fruit investigates the longing for self, the longing for another, and the longing for connection between the...

Daughterhood

Emily Adrian is determined to see her mother Ellen clearly. Part memoir, part autofiction, and part interview, Daughterhood charts a map of Ellen’s life before and after she became Emily’s mother. As a high schooler, Ellen lived alone in a trailer park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. At eig...

Razed by TV Sets

Jason McCall wanted to be a Hector, a hero who dies fighting for a worthy cause. Instead, he’s a Narcissus. He can’t stop seeing his own reflection. And, for him, that might be just as dangerous as being a black man in the United States. In Razed by TV Sets, McCall uses a variety of essay topics—...

Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering

Like millions of others, Erin Dorney discovered Adriene Mishler's "Yoga with Adriene" YouTube videos in 2020, while isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering collects epistolary prose poems written to—and in conversation with—the popular influencer, ...

In the Away Time

After two years in an intense relationship that breaks apart, Kristen E. Nelson is left to pick up the pieces. In the absence of her lover, she imagines, she collects impassioned break-up stories from friends, and she writes. In the Away Time is an evocative book of epistolary prose poems that at...

Culdesac

Mike Nagel has no idea what’s going on around here. Fresh out of the duplex, he and J have rented a house in a fantasy-themed neighborhood where people walk backwards, his neighbors weedwack constantly, and mysterious arrows have begun appearing on all the sidewalks. In this follow up to his surp...

A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others

Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, ...

Seldom Approaches

Seldom Approaches is a collection of poems, transcribed readings, and prose writings spanning nearly a decade, presented asynchronously, and interlaced with narrative passages, both abstract and autobiographical. It is a book both formed and unformed in a process of becoming. In Seldom Approaches...

The Swarm

A shapeshifting dream-diary and metaphysical thriller, The Swarm is inspired by the histories of dissident uprisings and migrational routes of Budapest; the geological depths of the hot springs, and the meandering flow of the Danube River. A polyphonic hum resounds in an octagonal domed chamber o...

Of

Of, the indescribable poetry collection from Kai Ihns, is a book that thinks about both relation and grammar and relation as grammar: how orienting oneself through the process of making sense necessarily commits one to certain ways of seeing the world, an idea the book views as both a source of m...

We Sailed on the Lake

We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.The poems in We Sailed on the Lake ...

What This Breathing

What This Breathing is a poetic experience that journeys across opacities in the lived underside of the hetero-patriarchal organization of social life. It searches for a language through which to reimagine relation: to the past, to other people, to self, to historical and ecological time, and to ...

A Cannibal Explains Himself To Himself

A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself explores extra-dimensional states of being that place into the praxis of language a natural yoga. It is a meditation that seeks to alter planetary pressures that continue to accrue during this protracted stage of late capital. The essay form is a provisional...

Grace Period

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, “Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace.” Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period : Notebooks, 1998–2007 would like to be something more interesting. Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, a...

No Realtor was Compensated for This Sale

No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale is the debut collection by the Athens-based poet, Helen Dimos. The co-organizer of the annual Paros Translation Symposium, she hosts a twice-monthly English-language radio show, peopletalk, at the Athens art center, Beton7. Dimos has chosen the following q...

the dust of a contact that is everywhere

the dust of a contact that is everywhere moves between theoretical reflection and aesthetic practice through essays, fragments, daybook entries, and lyrical experiments. It explores attention, the temporality of lyric lines, and the ethical implications of how we read, write, and live beside othe...

Detonated Mirror

Detonated Mirror is a hybrid text of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest, a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, while at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. It is the place of aliens, the atom bomb, sco...

WoO

WoO is a hagiography written and translated under the spiritual guide of a heretic. Ten years in the making, WoO (work without opus number) is a creative translation of the first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon that were lost by Joseph Smith, never found, and subsequently rewritten as The Book of...

Ode

An abecedarian cento of New York School poems, this piece was first delivered in March 1996 at The Popular Culture Association Conference. As Gizzi notes: “Ode: Salute to The New York School is a cento, a late Roman verse form made up of lines from other sources. First, I put together a chronolog...

Debt Ritual

Winner of the 2023 BUNNY chapbook contest, Katie Naughton’s Debt Ritual sees debt as intensely private yet nevertheless significantly interconnected with global financial systems and other systems of power. Naughton’s text is interested in the way that what appears as money is often funded by deb...

The General Theory of Social Relativity

The General Theory of Social Relativity is a theoretical monograph that presents a radically innovative framework for thinking about social processes. In the early twentieth century, theories of quantum physics and general relativity exposed the limits of Newton’s classical, mechanical, approach ...

Evening Oracle

Winner of the 2016 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, EVENING ORACLE is composed of poems originally handwritten at night before sleep in the beds of friends and strangers in Japan (2011-2012), and passages from emails and letters to and from friends and family on t...

New Organism

I am a girl, and what does it feel like to be a girl. It feels like a hand over your mouth. A hand over your mouth and on your thighs. Some say it is the sound of a rabbit before it is caught. It is the sound of the sky before it comes crashing down.

Home Movies

Home Movies is an essay about the day-to-day realities and unrealities of its author’s hypermediated consumer life as a teacher and parent in Orlando, Florida. In each of the essay’s seven sections, Wheaton explores his relationships to new media and old tech, and the people around him, with thou...

Can It!

In the foreword to his book Can It!, Edmund Berrigan explains that he’s “been looking to make a book… that works as both a whole and as parts, that might be visited from any point like a memory, that doesn’t rely on classification for definition… that tells a whole story by showing a fragmented r...

This Isa Nice Neighborhood

Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? This Isa Nice Neighborhood , Farid Matuk’s first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, betwe...

Freedom & Prostitution

FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION moves between histories of gendered violence, and the struggles against it, to argue for a notion of freedom as liberation and autonomy: the dream of a world without work, without money, without gender, while imagining forms of survival now for those who often have litt...

Bedroom Vowel

Consisting of lyric love letters to friends and musings on daily desire, nostalgia, and thirst for connection, Bedroom Vowel traces the development of an everyday philosophy formed in the social life of a creative

More Radiant Signal

Clark Coolidge, in reference to his own poems, writes, “We are accustomed to regard words in only one way—as vehicle. My experiments invite you to regard words as an object—or more exactly, as an organism, with patterns of existing that are specific to itself, inexplicable and marvelous.”More Rad...

To Hell With Sleep

Anselm Berrigan gives us a fresh dose of his discordant mind music. To Hell With Sleep was written by the poet in the first months after the birth of his daughter, mostly during brief periods of time when he was half-awake or less so, letting the poetry be unthought within its vehicle of eight s...

Deeper the Tropics

Deeper the Tropics navigates the mythology of the self via the masked figure. These poems present the self as an accumulation of faces—or masks—over which we have only partial control. Yet it’s in this semi-public, semi-private space of self where the poems celebrate the imaginative leaps we take...

The Week

Straddling the zone between fantasy and imagination, between fiction and essay, The Week presents models of minds shaped by the twenty-first century American realities that they also construct. The stories are unconventional in their arcs and uses of characterization, and in their foregrounding o...

The Letter Machine Book of Interviews

Featuring interviews with Rosa Alcalá, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Julie Carr, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Sarah Gridley, Paul Hoover, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Juliana Leslie, Dawn Lundy Martin, Farid Matuk, Fred Moten, Jennifer Moxley, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Travis Nichols, P...

Debt

The 25th-Anniversary Edition of DEBT, the National Poetry Series Winner and debut poetry collection by Mark Levine. With a new introduction by Srikanth Reddy."The velocity of these poems will induce motion sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine's aerial acrobatics always...

Landguage/Mirror Me

Formally distinct, the two chapbooks composing the tête-bêche Landguage/Mirror Me share the trappings of gendered and classed experiences where freedom isn't free. Located and then dislocated from place, grounded in Americanisms and warping them, self- and socially- conscious, Landguage/Mirror Me...

Half of What They Carried Flew Away

Half of What They Carried Flew Away is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, some...

Bijoux in the Dark

New poems from John Yau released in April of 2018. At the conclusion of Bijoux in the Dark, John Yau states, “I did not write a hauntingly beautiful book.” A line that contrasts with the book’s introductory poem, in which hauntings and beauty abound. With all of Bijoux in the Dark, the answer is ...

An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value

An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value is a fragmented book-length essay in which we see the city of Detroit through two distinct seasons: the summer Quartararo worked with a letterpress artist in a former veal locker, and the winter she lived on a dead end street slated for possible removal...

Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Jessica Laser’s debut full-length collection of poetryThere’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly bro...

an identity polyptych

an identity polyptych is a multi-part, multi-genre experiment that explores familial estrangement, identity as a mixed-race Black person, and movement towards reconciliation. It can be considered a memoir. The book works to find peace, even if it feels next to impossible. It keeps in mind the tri...

Bird/Diz

An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination. stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black Americ...

Iowa

In Iowa, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they hou...

kHarLaMoV's aNkLe

In this anarchic, post-genre poem-as-novel, imagined by one of Canada’s leading experimental writers, the dystopian politics of our everyday inhale both a contra tenor opera singer who lured to China by the Kanadian embassy and the innocent cultural attaché who invited him. kHarLaMoV’s aNkLe: a u...

Another Random Heart

This prose-poem sequence opens with the following sentence: “Scenes left on the cutting room floor flower into their own scenery.”Such an auspiciously suggestive start functions as a distillation of the book’s prismatic echo chamber, where painterly lyricism and narrative probing converge within ...

kith & kin

A poetic meditation on love and grief by a giant of the Bay Area literary community, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Kith & Kin is a serial poem composed (initially) over a one-year period. While each day might commence with its prompt, the writing inevitably would exceed the designation in its associati...

Writing the Ancestral River

Writing the Ancestral River is an illuminating and unusual biography of the Kowie River in the Eastern CapeThis tidal river runs through the centre of what used to be called the Zuurveld, a formative meeting ground of different peoples who have shaped our history: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoral...

Death and Compassion

Examines what literature reveals about human attitudes towards elephants and who shows compassion towards them Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a...

Lie on your wounds

Selection of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s letters from prison in opposition to South African apartheid This book collates nearly 300 prison letters to and from Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, inspirational political leader and first President of the Pan-Africanist Congress. These letters are testimony to...

The World Looks Like This From Here

Reflecting on the problematics of psychology as a colonial, Euro-American discipline, this book builds a compelling case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. This book sets out a situated, pluralising framework for researching, teaching and practising African psycholog...

Conspicuous Consumption in Africa

Amal’ezulu

Politics and Community-Based Research

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicis...

Organise or Die?

Organise or Die? Democracy and Leadership in South Africa?s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is the first in-depth study of one of the leading trade unions in the country. Founded in 1982, the trade union played a key role in the struggle against white minority rule, before turning into a cent...

Like Family

An analytic and historical perspective of literary texts to understand the position of domestic workers in South AfricaMore than a million black South African women are domestic workers. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once i...

Cape Radicals

Rogue Spying

In South Africa's democracy, the civilian intelligence agency's power has been weaponized to spy on political rivals, the media and civil society, while oversight institutions largely falter. As inquiries into Jacob Zuma's presidency opened doors for intelligence reform, Cyril Ramaphosa's adminis...

A Long Way Home

In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialization been as comprehensively based on migrant labour as in South Africa. Rather than focusing on the well-documented narrative of displacement and oppression, A Long Way Home captures the humanity, agency and creative modes of se...

African Ark

The story of how Africa’s mammals have helped shape the continent’s landscapes over time to support an amazing diversity of lifeAfrica is home to an amazing array of animals, including the world’s most diverse assortment of large mammals. These include the world’s largest terrestrial mammal, the ...

Regarding Muslims

An analysis of the role of Muslims from South Africa’s founding to the present and points to the resonance of these discussions beyond South Africa. How do Muslims fit into South Africa's well-known narrative of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid? South Africa is infamous for apartheid, bu...

Public Intellectuals in South Africa

This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African historyEdward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessi...

Labour Disrupted

Analyses the fragmentation and future of labour movements in South Africa and globally in the context of globalisation, the fourth industrial revolution and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences

A look at the research methods in development across the global SouthSocial science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconom...

Bury Me at the Marketplace

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a...

Mbeki and After

For nearly ten years – indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela’s presidency – Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa’s political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in Sout...

Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa

Sheds new light on Native Life appearing at a critical historical juncture, and reflects on how to read it in South Africa’s heightened challenges today. First published in 1916, Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa was written by one of the South Africa's most talented early twentieth-centu...

WITS

When the National Government assumed power in 1948, one of the earliest moves was to introduce segregated education. Its threats to restrict the admission of black students into the four ‘open universities’ galvanised the staff and students of those institutions to oppose any attempt to interfere...

A Search for Origins

A study of the 'Cradle of Humanity and its history.The 'Cradle of Humankind' (COH), bordering Gauteng and the North-West Province, was declared a World Heritage Site for the wealth of the human and animal fossils found there. Research based on fossils found in the area as well as signs of early h...

Becoming Men

This vivid evocation of the lives of 32 boys from a Johannesburg township is essential reading for anybody wishing to understand black masculinity in South AfricaBecoming Men is the story of 32 boys from Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's largest townships, over a period of twelve seminal years in ...

Land, Chiefs, Mining

Land, Chiefs, Mining explores aspects of the experience of the Batswana in the thornveld and bushveld regions of the North-West Province, shedding light on defi ning issues, moments and individuals in this lesser known region of South Africa. Some of the focuses are: an important Tswana kgosi (ch...

Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist

This intriguing memoir details in a quiet and restrained manner with what it meant to be a committed black intellectual activist during the apartheid years and beyond. Few autobiographies exploring the ‘life of the mind’ and the ‘history of ideas’ have come out of South Africa, and N Chabani Mang...

New South African Review 1

Is South Africa on a long-term decline?The New South African Review revives the tradition of critical, analytical scholarship developed by the South African Review in the 1970s and 1980s. Accessible to a wide readership and drawing upon authors from well beyond academia, its objective is to be in...

The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa

A detailed collection of information about the playing and making of the instruments of indigenous peoples' in South Africa. Percival Kirby was a musician and ethnomusicologist and for many years head of the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Between 1923 and...

Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto

Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto illustrates how this rapidly growing, underfunded but surprisingly effective institution found the niche that allowed it to exist, to provide medical care to a massive patient body and at times even to flourish in the apartheid state. The book offers new ways of explo...

Black X

What does it mean to be Black in an anti-Black world?In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole offers a compelling example of how to engage South Africa differently. Set in the Black point of view as a site of critical reflection, he confronts the question of colonial conquest, so...

I Want to Go Home Forever

Thirteen true stories about xenophobia and belonging in JohannesburgGenerations of people from across Africa, Europe and Asia have turned metal from the depths of the earth into Africa’s wealthiest, most dynamic and most diverse urban centre, a mega-city where post-apartheid South Africa is being...

Visual Century Volume Three: 1972-1993

In the third volume of the Visual Century Collection, the national struggle for democracy is juxtaposed with the challenging art of the time period.Visual Century: South African Art is a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the 20th century from a postapartheid per...

Parrots of Africa, Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands

A detailed examination of all aspects of parrots from behavior to their conservation.Parrots' colour and charisma, coupled with the fact that they mimic human speech, make them fascinating to many people. They are ancient birds with unique bill and foot structures that enable them to forage on fr...

Termites of the Gods

Siyakha Mguni’s personal journey, over many years, to discover the significance of a hitherto enigmatic theme in San rock paintings known as formlings. In Termites of the Gods, Siyakha Mguni narrates his personal journey, over many years, to discover the significance of a hitherto enigmatic theme...