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…
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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
Experimental books
Sacred experiments, intimate politics
June 19, 2024
On walks between writing, when I pass the California poppies, I let them press into my mind, remembering a poem from Lata Mani’s Myriad Intimacies: “nectarous orange / pulsing for hours.” The…
June 19, 2024
Experimental books
Brilliance and complexity: Publishing Lata Mani’s Myriad Intimacies
June 19, 2024
Lata Mani has been an intellectual hero of mine since before I became an editor at Duke University Press. I had attended the pathbreaking “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture” conference at…
June 19, 2024
Experimental books
by
Mona Oraby
Experimental books—An introduction

In 2019, Liane Carlson wrote about a dying field (hers, the philosophy of religion). Its death arrived more rapidly than most others. She observed that the collective nature of all scholarship (“There is no intellectual work that does not take place as part of a dialogue with the living or dead”) sits awkwardly alongside the […]
June 19, 2024
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