Punctum Books

25/02/2020

New from KEEP IT DIRTY, vol. a., "Filth":

"The Iconography of Au******ic Asphyxiation: From Fantasmatic Fe**sh to Forensic Fact" by Lisa Downing and Dany Nobus

http://keepitdirty.org/a/the-iconography-of-autoerotic-asphyxiation/

      I. Images Bearing Witness     It is to psychiatric and forensic experts that society allots the task of interpreting the nature and function of some of the most intimate and complex of human experiences, among them manifestations of s*xuality and conditions of death. The interface between...

11/01/2020

Statement from the Directors of Punctum Books —

In response to our community, the Call for Papers (CFP), , is now open for annotation. I want to thank Anna Waymack & Diane Watt, esp. for challenging me in ways that were caring & productive. Let’s model a feminist critical practice together. we are inviting the community to write with, over, for, against (etc.) any & all portions of the CFP: no one at punctum will intervene, censor or talk back. The CFP will be archived publicly. Forever.

These annotations will represent a collective way of facing, working through, and hopefully repairing the kind of trauma that the field of early medieval studies has caused for so many years, and which this CFP has also triggered in our community of scholars and learners for whom we care deeply and with whom we want to model a better, more inclusive, and more generously capacious academic community-to-come. We want to model, further, a feminist critical practice in which the sorts of “argumentation” so prevalent in toxic masculine culture will not predominate. Eileen Joy, who wrote the CFP, will not “disappear” any of her words, and will be attentive, without interruption or pushback, to all annotations.

In the tradition of the medieval book, all annotations, along with the CFP, will stand as a public record of an academic community’s productively rowdy dissensus, and the page will be archived into perpetuity with no revisions whatsoever to anyone’s words: a cacophony, if you will, of a field in crisis, but in which everyone strives to really hear and respect each other’s feelings, experiences, trauma, and intellectual practices. The annotated webpage will become part of the permanent archive of punctum, always available for the scholars of the future, as opposed to disappearing into the ether of ephemeral social media owned by those who do not share our values nor care for us.

Let’s build together a legible cacophony of a field in crisis, where everyone strives to hear & respect each other’s feelings, experiences, trauma & intellectual practices on a non-profit community-led platform where we won’t be disappeared into the ether of social media.



https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/32jkj43b/branch/1

NOTE (added Jan 11, 2020): This CFP, like any punctum books pub, is open for annotation. After signing up for a PubPub account (upper right corner), select any text and an annotation window will appear. These annotations will represent a collective way of facing, working through, and hopefully repai...

07/01/2020

The Year in Review for Punctum Books titles published in 2019! Check out all the brilliant authors who published books with Punctum last year, and in to boot!

Biophilia, Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, avant-garde photography (the writing of Osamu Kanemura in a dual-language Japanese-English edition), liquid life and non-linear materiality, the museum of non-humanity, post-memes, the “terrain vague” of Beirut, metagestures, critical race theory and the misappropriation of antiracist work, “damaged” reflections on Turkey (translated from Turkish), TV anthropology, how we read, Enrique Dussel’s pedagogics of liberation (first translation into English!), suicidal suburban teenagers and holy parrots, the poetics and cultural genealogy of the computer code for the Apollo 11 moon landing, noise studies meets the Anthropocene, Nubian studies, AngloSaxon(ist) pasts and postSaxon futures, and MORE!

https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/2019books

And if you think it’s amazing that we published all of these books in 2019 , without charging authors a single dime to do so, consider dropping a dime on Punctum by becoming a patron of the press for as little as $10/month. When you do so, you will be supporting a scholar-led, community-owned, public mission-driven, non-profit, and importantly *independent* press that fosters and curates work that likely would not find a welcoming harbor with more traditional academic publishers. Help us to continue this good work and to add more WEIRD work, and a more diverse set of minds and voices, to the Public Commons.

Our sincere thanks to all of our authors, readers, friends, and collaborators for making this year possible. And from all of us at punctum books, we wish you a book-filled new year!

24/12/2019

Merry 🎉🥳🎁🧚‍♀️🍾 Eve from all of us at punctum ! So much for all of our authors, readers & our & & & . We’ve had this year, haven’t we? And next year is looking pretty good too! Thanks to ALL OF . Let’s keep this going ‘til it’s #2029.

22/12/2019

🎉PUNCTUM BOOKS FESTIVUS SALE🎉

4 select titles bundled together for only 30 $£€ (or 7.50 each)

James Dobson and Rena J. Mosteirin’s MOONBIT (the code poetics and experimental poetry of the computational wizardry behind the Apollo 11 mission!), A.W. Strouse’s GENDER TROUBLE COUPLETS (Judith Butler’s historic and always hip masterpiece rendered into medieval-y octosyllabic couplets!), Kye Askins &co’s A NUCLEAR REFRAIN (“A Xmas Carol” retold as fable of nuclear deterrence published as a miniature 4 X 6 chapbook!), and JH Phrydas’s IMPERIAL PHYSIQUE (cruising in the public shadows of empire! contact across bodies and time! San Francisco! s*x!)

Buy the 4-PAK for 30 or any 1 for 7.50 (in these currencies: 💵💶💳💷)

Give the people in your life radical books📚

Go to punctumbooks.com, select from our catalogue ♥️

SALE prices good until New Years’s Day 🎉🎏🎊 2020!

19/12/2019

We have rarely published a book so brim-full of an exuberant affection for the liveliness of all living ( ) things & which refuses the reductionist, brute-materialist mechanical models of life. LIQUID LIFE: On Non-Linear Materiality, by Rachel Armstrong, published this week in as a co-publication of punctum and the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, is a must-read for our ecologically troubled times (& at 600 gorgeous pages, no less!).

This book is a : an uncategorisiable treatise and synthesis of text, quotations, provocations, images, conceptual slippages, voices, ideas, writing styles, events, and narratives.

The book's loose body plan responds to its (liquid, watery, fluid, vicuous) contexts where sections support, contradict & hybridise each other. An orchestrated cacophony, an project, a Babel in the making, it seeks to maintain its diplomatic coherence despite everything.



Read MORE here:

https://bit.ly/2PDpp3B

VIVE la Open Access and ScholarLed, Community-led Publishing!

15/12/2019

It's kind of a big deal.

Last week, on behalf of Punctum Books, Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei signed & delivered our copy of the consortial agreement with Coventry University; Birkbeck College, University of London; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Regents of the University of California; Loughborough University; Open Book Publishers, Directory of Open Access Books (Netherlands), and Jisc (UK) for a 3-year collaborative project on Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs dreamed up by the presses of ScholarLed (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and Punctum Books), generously funded for £3 million by Research England and the Arcadia Fund (with additional contributions from the partners totalling approximately £500,000)!

Vive la Open Access and Scholar-led, Community-owned Infrastructure for Open Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences!

https://blog.scholarled.org/

15/12/2019

Some pix from last week, , where Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Dan Rudmann & Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, along with the crew of the Coko Foundation (Adam Hyde and Alison McGonagle-O'Connell) and the Editoria Publishing Community (MPublishing, UC Press, California Digital Library, UCSB Library, punctum books, Fulcrum, Minnesota, ATLA, Paged.js, and the French Court of the Comptroller: yes, really) celebrated 2 days of strategic planning for the EditoriaPub Community!

We missed you, Sherri L. Barnes!

12/12/2019

Punctum Books has a new logo!

And we have a new partnership with MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group: visit our new COMMS site built on the Knowledge Futures Group’s PubPub platform to find out about our new releases, what readers and reviewers are saying about our books, and to read regular posts by our directors: myself, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, and Dan Rudmann!



https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org

Vive la Open Access & Public Knowledge.

a comms page for punctum books

11/12/2019

A new review of Jonathan Goldberg's SAPPHO: ]fragments, punctum author and Lammy nominee JH Phrydas writes about the "pure, q***r divine" of San Francisco for the "LA Review of Books," Julietta Singh discusses NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU in a new interview at "Women & Performance," co-editor of punctum's forthcoming volume ANTHROPOCENE UNSEEN Cymene Howe featured in "How to Mourn a Glacier," published in "The New Yorker," co-editor of ANTIRACISM INC. Felice Blake's TEDx Talk, "The Poetics of Liberation," and more in punctum's December Newsletter --

Vive la Open Access, Public Knowledge, and Spontaneous Acts of Scholarly Combustion!

https://mailchi.mp/5d15c99ac5f8/djg8jiigob-2354025

04/12/2019

The punctum crew is (almost) ready for Day 2 of the Editoria Publishing Community meeting in !



Where’s the coffee?

03/12/2019

The crew from Punctum Books — Eileen Joy, Vincent van Gerven Oei, & Dan Rudmann — are attending the 3rd Editoria Community meeting in ! As always, at any software development meeting (in this case, software for making books), plugging in one’s devices is Step #1. And no matter what it takes, punctum (Vincent) can do it.

18/11/2019

Something to CELEBRATE in the world of Early Medieval English Studies!

BEOWULF BY ALL, edited by Jean Abbott and Elaine Treharne, with assistance from Mateusz Fafinski, and featuring OVER 200 TRANSLATORS, crowd-sourced online, will SOON be forthcoming from Punctum Books!

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/beowulf-by-all/

Beowulf by All began as an idea to bring together a large group of contributors to create a polyvocal translation of the eleventh-century poem, Beowulf. The uniquely surviving work, composed in Old English, is contained in the London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv manuscript (meaning it once sat, in the Cotton Library, prior to the founding of the British Museum in 1753, in the 15th place on the A-shelf in the cabinet topped by a bust of the Roman emperor Vitellius!), and it is still one of the most widely studied literary works in English. It tells the story of the pseudo-historical and mythical Beowulf, as he lives his life fighting the monstrous Others of Daneland and the Geatland, in which battles the lines between “human” and “monster,” “man” and “animal,” “nation-state” and “wilderness,” “friend” and “enemy,” “relative” and “foreigner” (etc.) become hopelessly entangled. Beowulf fights and defeats Grendel and Grendel’s mother, terroristic stalkers of King Hrothgar and the Danes, before being killed, as an aged king, in battle with a fire-breathing dragon guarding an ancient hoard in Beowulf’s native Geatland. His actions mark him out as a dragon-slayer, but also as the supposedly most kind and most merciful of men (according to his own mourners) — simultaneously warrior and protector (but perhaps, also, a monster himself). Alongside Beowulf’s story, multiple other shorter narratives and voices are woven throughout the poem, making it a rich and varied account of the poet’s and his community’s (often conflicted) views of heroism, hospitality, conflict, violence, war, loyalty, and what it means to be caught in the (often violent) flows of historical time.

TRANSLATORS:

Jean Abbott, Paul Acker, Lindsey Allen, Tarren Andrews and the Flathead Indian Reservation, Max William Ashton, David T.H. Baker, Courtney Barajas, Tiffany Beechy, R. Scott Bevill, Tom Birkett, Virginia Blanton, William E. Bolton, Berber Bossenbroek, Matthew Boutilier, Lindy Brady, Thomas A Bredehoft, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., Anne Breyer, Justin Briley, Francesca Brooks, Brantley Bryantt, Emily Butler, Peter Buchanan, Donald Burke, Deirdre Carney, Leslie Carpenter, Richard Carter Fahey, Megan Cavell, E.J. Christie, Anthony G. Cirilla, David Clark, Lauren Claus, Abraham Cleaver, Oshay Columbus, Patrick Conner, Patricia O Connor, Aidan Conti, Jeremy Cooley, Erika Corradini, Jessie Cortez, Sam Cox, Tristan Cox, Laura Creedon, Alexander D’Alisera, Glenn M. Davis, Jonathan Davis-Secord, Siân Echard, Andrew Eichel, James Eric Ensley, Olivia Ernst, Heide Estes, James Estes, Josh Eyler, Kevin Fabery, Mateusz Fafinski, George Ferzoco, Jill M. Fitzgerald, Kimberlee Flack, Damian Fleming, Rachel Fletcher, Chainy J. Folsom, Anna Fore Waymack, Hilary Fox, Martin Foys, Jill Frederick, Angela B. Fulk, Bruce Gilchrist, Shannon Godlove, Jack Goldfisher, Miguel Gomes, Micah Goodrich, Katrina Graham, Steven T. Gray, Nicole Guenther Discenza, Stephen Guy-Bray, David Hadbawnik, Alaric Hall, Jill Hamilton Clements, Brian Christopher Hardison, Brandon Hawk, Nathan John Haydon, Sarah Hayes-Hickey, Daniel Hellstrom, Lauren Herring, Alice Hicklin, Sarah Higley, Jacob Hobson, Natalie Hodges, Emrys Holmes, Shari Horner, Aaron Hostetterr, Jonathan Hui, Mary Kate Hurley, Matthew T. Hussey, Sarah Beah Jacobson, Janea James, Lesley E. Jacobs, Christopher Jensen, Michael Joseph, David Johnson, Chris Jones, Emma Kantor, Niamh Kehoe, Anna Kelner, Kayla Kemhadjian, Jasmine Kilburn-Small, Alison Elizabeth Killilea, Susan M. Kim, Yvette Kisor, David Klausner, Andrew W. Klein, Stacy S Klein, Gwendolyne Knight, Lilla Kopár, Bre Leake, Madeleine LeBrun, Brittany Ledford, Barbara Lee Bolt, Mary Leech, Francis Leneghan, Ashley Lesley, John D. Lewis, Joan Li, Roy Liuzza, Elise Louviot, Shu-han Luo, Jaylon Mallory, Arianna Marealle, Heather Maring, Melissa Mayus, Frances McCormack, Patrick McCoy, Murray McGillivray, Joey McMullen, Rebecca Merkelbach, Nancy M. Michael, Asa Simon Mittman, Britt Mize, Steven Modugno, Neville Mogford, Carrie Moll, Christopher Monk, Sarah Moore, Jennifer Neville, Beth Newman Ooi, Josephine Nolan, Brian O’Camb, Robin Norris, Stephanie Opfer, Emily Ott, Dana Oswald, Dylan Perese, Jasmine Phillips, Leah Pope Parker, Thijs Porck, Branden Printup, Jonathan Quick, M.R. Rambaran-Olm, Elizabeth L. Rambo, Alexandra Reider, Melissa Ridley Elmes, J.H. Roberts, Damián Robles, Matt Roots, Jerrod Rosenbaum, Lauren Rosenblatt, Andre Ross, Spenser Santos, Michael Savarese, Helene Scheck, Robert Schichler, Sara Schliep, Janet Schrunk Ericksen, Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar, Maggie Scott, Donald Scragg, Erin Sebo, John P. Sexton, Joseph Shack, Erin M. Shaull, Rebecca Shores, Jessica Silvis, Amy Smith, Joshua Byron Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Stanton, Rebecca Straple, Robert Jesse Stratton, Ilya V. Sverdlov, Erik Tamre, Carla María Thomas, Sarah Thompson, Manon Thuillier, Katayoun Torabi, Bethan Tovey, Larissa Tracy, Elaine Treharne, Janine van Drünen, Martha Valenzuela, Laura Varnam, Chris Vinsonhaler, Phong Vo, Christine Voth, Kelsey Waddy, Brea Walker, Eric Weiskott, Lisa Weston, Elizabeth A. Williamsen, Natalie Whitaker, Alex Woolf, Jordan Zweck.

*Cover design by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

related dôNrm’-lä-püsl Beowulf: A Translation Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties Beowulf by All Edited by Jean Abbott, Elaine Treharne, Mateusz FafinskiFORTHCOMING Winter 2020 Beowulf by All began as ...

15/11/2019

In the tradition of the Revolutionary Cookbook (“Eggs Benedict Arnold”), teaching Structuralism through Hipster vs. Amish beards (“Is that beard ironic?”), and literary hostess gifts (“Lady Macbeth’s Soap”), comes this brilliant rhymed couplet version of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Rarely has a poet applied his gifts to a more deserving subject. Strouse is the the Jeff Koons of q***r theory, the Kim Kardashian of différance, the Lisa Frank of same-s*x. In the grand tradition of rhymed pedagogical commentary — think Chaucer teaching Litel Louis how to use the Astrolabe — this funny and useful book will be an instant bestseller, a perfect gift for the nerd and hipster in your life, and the best Valentine cadeau for your secret q***r crush whom you want but cannot quite name.

~ Anna Klosowska, author of Q***r Love in the Middle Ages

NOW PUBLISHED! A.W. Strouse’s GENDER TROUBLE COUPLETS, Vol. 1 —

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/gender-trouble-couplets-volume-1/

Judith Butler’s GENDER TROUBLE: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity radically claimed that the s*xed body is a fallacy, discursively constructed by the performance of gender. A.W. Strouse has undertaken to rewrite Butler’s classic tome into an octosyllabic poem. Inspired by the rhyming encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, Strouse transforms each of Butler’s sentences into punchy medieval couplets. Relishing in the campiness of rhyme and meter—in the bodily pleasures of form—Strouse’s GENDER TROUBLE COUPLETS is an imitation for which there is no original. Butler’s “Gender Trouble,” perhaps, was poetry all along.

31/10/2019

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Last week was International Open Access (OA) Week, which focused on and building more equitable foundations for Open Access publishing. This is something that we at Punctum Books work on every day, and with very little (for almost 10 years now!) in the way of institutional or other forms of external support. This year (January 2019, to be more exact), we happily entered into a formal partnership with UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library, whereby we are sharing with each other various forms of expertise and resources, and they have also donated staff-time to punctum to help us to retrofit our entire catalog so that it follows all the “best practices” for the curation, discovery, dissemination, and preservation of OA books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, this and last year we have also forged partnerships and helped to develop new communities and consortia with: Coko Foundation (with whom we are helping to develop open source software for making books: Editoria Community), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Project Muse, the National Library of the Netherlands, OAPEN Library (Netherlands), the Radical OA Collective (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), RNIB Bookshare, UK (who create special editions of our e-books for print-disabled readers), and ScholarLed (a new consortium of non-profit OA presses who want to build open infrastructure for OA books: Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books), who have received 3 million in funding from Research England and the Arcadia Fund to build Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs. What this has ALL meant is that we have finally been able to launch (just this past April) our Supporting Library Membership Program --

https://punctumbooks.com/supporting-library-membership-program/

-- which allows us to finally be able to ask university libraries, all over the world, to help underwrite punctum's operating costs (consortial library funding revenue model), which helps us to ensure that we will NEVER EVER impose publication fees upon our authors, as many other Open Access platforms and presses do in order to survive. The other way we manage to survive (and thrive!) is through NPR-style reader pledges, whereby individual devotees of punctum can pledge as little as $10/month to help us defray the immense human and other costs that go into making each book (roughly $5,000 to $8,000 per title).

https://punctumbooks.com/support

For a more just and verdant knowledge economy, become a punctum subscriber and support a non-fees-based Open Access publisher. When you opt in as a punctum subscriber, you become a Sustaining Partner of the press, helping us to: (a) defray the immense human and other costs that go into making each book (roughly $5,000-$8,000 per title); (b) keep our Public Commons promiscuously open; and (c) cultivate creative and risk-taking intellectual work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere.

OR, do us one better. If you are lucky enough to have a full-time academic position, talk to your librarians (especially those who work in Collections, Digital Initiatives & Publishing, and Scholarly Communications), and tell them what you know about punctum, and ask them to check out our Supporting Library Membership Program. Tell them that, for every library that supports punctum (at incredibly reasonable annual rates, I might add), they will help to wipe out tens (and hundreds) of thousands of dollars in OA publication fees that libraries are increasingly being asked to pay directly to publishers on behalf of their faculty who want, or need, to publish in OA venues. We're different. We don't extort libraries. We work hand in hand with them to build a better, more just, and more equitable future, not just for academic publishing (narrowly defined), but for what the poet Lisa Robertson once called the Welcoming Pavilion of Thought. For everyone, and anyone, who needs it.

Vive la Open Access!

27/10/2019

Reviewing the print proofs for JH Phrydas's IMPERIAL PHYSIQUE in the offices of punctum pacific!

http://bit.ly/2W24k2B

In 2008, JH Phrydas wrote a story about how bodies talk without words. He wanted the story to not just describe the silent ritual of nonverbal communication but to perform it. The interaction would be visceral – the exchange melancholic, yet full of lust. He wanted words to retain the unsayable: the subtle movements of a body in heat. In the years since, Phrydas has kept rewriting this story, using different techniques, different syntaxes and forms, in hopes that he would find a successful method of gestural writing.

IMPERIAL PHYSIQUE is a collection of these attempts. They explore the way our bodies hover between animal and human, civil and wild. The bleakness – and underlying verve – of imagining Western empires in decline serve as a backdrop for a lone figure searching city streets, decaying architecture, and sand dunes for some type of physical connection. What arises is the loss of – and longing for – touch at the edges of imperialism, historical violence, and personal shame.

🌈 *xuality *x ***rStudies