Pieced-together scraps from the cutting room floor—that is how anthropologist and archaeologist Shannon Dawdy describes her book American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century. As a metaphor for all the anecdotes,…
Latest posts
Experimental books
A new American way of death
June 26, 2024
I can’t think of any scholarly projects, books or otherwise, that begin and end at the author’s grave. And certainly none that encourage the reader to get down in that dirt and…
June 26, 2024
Experimental books
Earth
June 26, 2024
American Afterlives concludes with the ritualized disinterment of the author’s decomposed corpse. An archaeologist is excavating a twenty-first century cemetery, nestled in a California oak savannah. She discovers some decayed cloth and…
June 26, 2024
Experimental books
The Life of American Afterlives
June 26, 2024
I first became aware of Shannon Dawdy’s American Afterlives during the fall of 2019, when her friend and fellow New Orleanian, the literary scholar and Princeton author Bryan Wagner, suggested that she…
June 26, 2024
Experimental books
Thinking with form, playing with genre
June 19, 2024
Myriad Intimacies experiments with form and genre to enact a mode of thinking about interrelations. Its core argument is that our lives, the concepts by which we understand ourselves, and the social…
June 19, 2024
Experimental books
Myriad Intimacies and feminist political imagination
June 19, 2024
I read Myriad Intimacies with joy and wonder. It is a beautiful book that frames itself as an offering, rather than an intervention—a spiritual journey between secular and sacred. It pushes against…
June 19, 2024
Load more












