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Reading Behind Bars is a meditation on what reading, thinking, and talking look like under conditions of radical constraint — and on how literature can function as a medium of lived experience rather than mere intellectual abstraction.
Drawing on the experience of teaching at Mt. Tamalpais College at the San Quentin Correctional Facility in Marin County, California, literary scholar Alan Tansman traces the extraordinary seriousness with which incarcerated students engage literary works form many times and places: the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious," and Jean Améry's "On Torture." The heart of the book lies not in these canonical works themselves but in the students' responses — writing and discussion that is open and intense in a way that university classrooms rarely are. These students are not merely powerful witnesses to suffering; they are careful, committed readers. Their interpretations are alert to ethical stakes and formal detail, shaped by firsthand knowledge of the struggle with living in a painful present, haunted by a hard look toward a future open to their own making. What kind of refuge can literature offer from pain, guilt, and the weight of the past? Can that refuge also offer a guide for living behind bars, and beyond?
Americans have spoken of candidates “running” for office and of elections as “races” for so long that we no longer hear the sports metaphor. In Rooting Interests, cultural historian David Henkin takes the metaphor seriously. Since the 1830s, when American elections became mass spectacles staged before an unprecedented electorate, voting and rooting have grown up together, alongside horse racing, prizefighting, and baseball. Fans and voters alike know their single preference will almost never decide the outcome, yet they bet, brag, wear the colors, bask in reflected glory, and blame the coach. From Van Buren’s invention of the mass party through Progressive reform, women’s suffrage, and today’s red-and-blue map, Henkin traces a durable structure of partisan feeling that binds strangers to party labels across generations. If voters now behave more like fans, it is not because politics has been trivialized into sport, but because they care more and switch sides less.
Contemporary art and politics have undergone many unexpected shifts. Long a strategy of the Left, transgression has become a weapon of the Right, and staples of critical theory, such as the critique of the subject, are transformed in the age of artificial intelligence. Art historian and critic Hal Foster reflects on these and other developments, looking back to modernist culture to see what can be reclaimed for present purposes. In particular, Modernism, An Incomplete Project considers how the constructive, even utopian dimension of modernist art might be remotivated in the face of ecological catastrophe, and how this move might free us from a melancholic fixation on a past viewed only as traumatic.
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Our editorial supplement featuring commentary on new and old pamphlets, announcements and news from the press, and more from our editors, authors, and collaborators.
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Reading Behind Bars is a meditation on what reading, thinking, and talking look like under conditions of radical constraint — and on how literature can function as a medium of lived experience rather than mere intellectual abstraction.
Drawing on the experience of teaching at Mt. Tamalpais College at the San Quentin Correctional Facility in Marin County, California, literary scholar Alan Tansman traces the extraordinary seriousness with which incarcerated students engage literary works form many times and places: the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious," and Jean Améry's "On Torture." The heart of the book lies not in these canonical works themselves but in the students' responses — writing and discussion that is open and intense in a way that university classrooms rarely are. These students are not merely powerful witnesses to suffering; they are careful, committed readers. Their interpretations are alert to ethical stakes and formal detail, shaped by firsthand knowledge of the struggle with living in a painful present, haunted by a hard look toward a future open to their own making. What kind of refuge can literature offer from pain, guilt, and the weight of the past? Can that refuge also offer a guide for living behind bars, and beyond?
Americans have spoken of candidates “running” for office and of elections as “races” for so long that we no longer hear the sports metaphor. In Rooting Interests, cultural historian David Henkin takes the metaphor seriously. Since the 1830s, when American elections became mass spectacles staged before an unprecedented electorate, voting and rooting have grown up together, alongside horse racing, prizefighting, and baseball. Fans and voters alike know their single preference will almost never decide the outcome, yet they bet, brag, wear the colors, bask in reflected glory, and blame the coach. From Van Buren’s invention of the mass party through Progressive reform, women’s suffrage, and today’s red-and-blue map, Henkin traces a durable structure of partisan feeling that binds strangers to party labels across generations. If voters now behave more like fans, it is not because politics has been trivialized into sport, but because they care more and switch sides less.
Contemporary art and politics have undergone many unexpected shifts. Long a strategy of the Left, transgression has become a weapon of the Right, and staples of critical theory, such as the critique of the subject, are transformed in the age of artificial intelligence. Art historian and critic Hal Foster reflects on these and other developments, looking back to modernist culture to see what can be reclaimed for present purposes. In particular, Modernism, An Incomplete Project considers how the constructive, even utopian dimension of modernist art might be remotivated in the face of ecological catastrophe, and how this move might free us from a melancholic fixation on a past viewed only as traumatic.
The “Great Acceleration” describes a set of interrelated human-driven transformations of Earth’s systems, including the eightfold population growth since 1800. Yet ideas about population in the epoch many call the Anthropocene sit uncomfortably in contemporary discussions.
How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together the world’s key thinkers in Anthropocene studies from a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geography, demography, history, political theory, and more. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene, or should we even think in terms of population at all? The twelve short essays in this pamphlet offer responses that reimagine how we think about economy, environment, consumption, reproduction and extinction.
The second Trump administration has committed itself to upending the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions that have been essential to modern democracy, with the American university — site of scientific research and liberal education — a primary target. In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler spotlights an American tradition of such hostility to intellectual life, especially the nativist movement of the 1850s that persecuted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Steve Bannon, the self-proclaimed “Know-Nothing vulgarian” who long ago recruited candidate Trump to his anti-intellectual crusade, is himself the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who would have faced Know-Nothing backlash in that era.
Such dark ironies define our moment, Chandler argues, and they call out not only for intellectual critique but also for satire. Yet in the midst of the MAGA campaign’s calamitous effects on American public discourse, even satire must confront the “kayfabe” practices imported by Trump from professional wrestling, which mix illusion and reality to turn political life into a “spectacle without thought.” Drawing widely on cultural critics from Jonathan Swift and Alexis de Tocqueville to Roland Barthes, Chandler’s pamphlet offers an elegant and bracing account of the MAGA campaign against higher learning and its transformative effects on criticism and democracy itself.
A lively and thoughtful exploration of how book clubs change the way we read. In this engaging and vivacious memoir, college professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska thinks back on various book clubs she has been a part of. Through brief discussions of a variety of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works such as Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums, and Alma Guillermoprieto's Dancing in Cuba, she considers how the things she has learned in book club discussions differ from what she tries to teach students in her literature classes. As she muses on the various benefits that we imagine reading offers, she describes the unique knowledge that book clubs can provide.
A critical synthesis of the work of Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein. The Treadmill Affect draws upon the work of three University of Chicago professors, each a former program director at the Center for Transcultural Studies. Through this intellectual synthesis, Benjamin Lee demonstrates the critical possibilities of uniting a revived linguistic turn with Marxist accounts of affect and subjectivity, adding new dimensions to the “treadmill” affective structure of cruel optimism.
A memoir of reading and working with books by the renowned Booklist editor. With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman’s journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.
What kind of meaning can machines make — and why does it matter that it’s not the same as ours?
Anthropologist Paul Kockelman's Last Words (2024) offers a rigorous but accessible account of how large language models actually work — and why the meaning they produce is fundamentally different from human meaning-making. Drawing on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, Kockelman’s witty and insightful pamphlet shows how LLMs are trained to predict word-word relations, not word-world relations, which explains both their uncanny fluency and their systematic blind spots. The result is a compact, essential guide to cutting through the hype: not a dismissal of AI, but a precise account of what it can and cannot do — and who profits from the confusion.
America. From the twenty-seven complaints against George III in the Declaration of Independence to the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, grievance has been constitutive of white American identity, even if it has been rarely self-acknowledged.
Grievance: In Fragments is an unusual pamphlet, combining short aphorisms and longer fragments to explore the resentment, grudge, and complaint that run through the white American story. The pieces echo, extend, and frequently contradict one another as they range from Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee to the QAnon Shaman and other uncivil defenders of civil society. Farred sets grievance against grief, which opens us to others' losses where grievance answers only to its own. Can grief take in the aggrieved without turning into grievance?
Philosophical, irreverent, and deeply unsettling, Grievance is to be savored, less an argument than a pamphlet where each thought stands alone yet is undone by the next.
The “Great Acceleration” describes a set of interrelated human-driven transformations of Earth’s systems, including the eightfold population growth since 1800. Yet ideas about population in the epoch many call the Anthropocene sit uncomfortably in contemporary discussions.
How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together the world’s key thinkers in Anthropocene studies from a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geography, demography, history, political theory, and more. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene, or should we even think in terms of population at all? The twelve short essays in this pamphlet offer responses that reimagine how we think about economy, environment, consumption, reproduction and extinction.