Thomas Lay

Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Wendy Brown, Lee Edelman, Joan Scott, Rey Chow, and Camille Robcis for blurbing it (the latter three blurbs are to be found inside.)

Just out: Zahid Chaudhary gives a superb psychoanalytic account of what we've been calling post-truth. Chaudhary is a superb reader of the realation of psychic and the social together, and the result is a major account of the psycho-politics of Trumpism and what lies behind and beyond it.

Back cover. Many thanks to Anne Norton and Uday Mehta for the blurbs and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.

Just out: Massimiliano Tomba on "outdated" concepts that resurface in politically radical ways. My daughter recently asked me why I'm interested in things from the past if they can't change. My answer was that they do, they resurface and change the present. This book suggests how that might happen.

Back cover. Many thanks to Talal Asad and Amira Mittermaier for the blurbs and to Clara Han, Bhrigupati Singh, and Andrew Brandel for sponsoring it for Thinking from Elsewhere.

Just out: Basit Iqbal's accout of Islamic humanitarian organizations is a superb ethnography of aid in the wake of the Syrian civil war. But it's more than that too: a philosophically rich account of how Islamic theology might inflect the questions an ethnographer can ask.

Here's the back cover. Thanks to Ban Wang and Glenn Perry for blurbing it and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.

Just out: Chunjie Zhang explores an exchange of philosophical traditions in the early twentieth century in which German philosophers turned to Chinese thought and Chinese philosophers turned to German traditions -- and the entwined conceptiosn of modernity that these encounters produced.

Fall 2025 Catalog Browse our latest titles in New York City & regional studies, American studies, LGBTQ studies, race & ethnic studies, political science, history, literary studies, philosophy & theory, the...

Catalog time!

Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Chris Newfield and Caroline Levine for blurbing it.

Just out: May Hawas and Bruce Robbins have put together a terrific, and admirably international collection, called "Teaching Politically." Nobody needs me to say how important a topic this is at the moment.

Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Angela Naimou for blurbing it.

Just out: Rose Casey's sparkling account of the ways postcolonial literature has generated conceptual capacities for thinking in fresh ways about property law. A really fine account of the interplay between aesthetics and politics, especially beyond North American and European legal traditions.

Just out: Lauren Shizuko Stone on the queerness of German children's literature -- and how it imagines temporality in ways that challenge the anglophone discourse on that question. I hope some non-Germanists will take this up too - it's a fascinating account.

Here's the back cover. With thanks to Roz Morris for coordinating with Rafael as he wrote and translated the book across his final months, to Claudio Lomnitz, Igor Barreto, and Luis Pérez-Oramas for their afterwords, and to Rihan Yeh, Javier Guerrero, and Charles Hirschkind for blurbing it.

Just out: a final (alas) book by the brilliant anthropologist Rafael Sanchez that's quite a bit more than what the subtitle calls a memoir. It's a very personal acount of coming to terms with the ugliness of patriarchy, as well as the possibility of politics he found in the plazas of Venezuela.

Here's the back cover.

Another book I didn't sponsor myself but wish I had: Andrea Moore on new music and memorialization. She's interested both in the question of who is, as Butler would say, grievable, as well as in how music thinks memory in ways that language -- or even the conventional languages of music -- don't.

Back cover herewith.

Those who know Roz Morris as a brilliant scholar whose work moves between anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies, may know that she's also a superb poet. This book (which I didn't sponsor myself) shows the range of her talents.

Glad to be at SCMS for the first time. Come say hi if you’re here.

Here's the back cover, which gives some sense of its scope, from Grand Hotel through Resnais, Akerman, Brakhage, Jarmusch, and Sean Baker, not forgetting a 1912 short about hotel voyeurs played by dead insects by way of stop motion animation. Many thanks to B. Ruby Rich for the blurb.

A fabulous entry in our new film series. For Jules O'Dwyer, the hotel is not just a setting but bound up with the techniques of cinema itself in its orchestration of space, its practices of labor, and its deleneation of the public and the private. Fun and fascinating.

Back cover. Thanks to Jordy Rosenberg for the new blurb and the late Hayden White for the old one.

Just out: a reissue of a classic, with a fine new preface. Butler's the best.

Excerpt | The Prop and the Performer Actors need to touch things.

And finally, a teaser, on Mubi: mubi.com/en/notebook/...

There’s Always Tomorrow (PG) [35mm] + ScreenTalk with Elena Gorfinkel, John David Rhodes and Joanna Hogg | Barbican Join us for this rare screening and opportunity to delve into Douglas Sirk's masterful melodrama There's Always Tomorrow that explores the suffocating confines of middle-class domesticity.

And if you're in London, go see both the authors and a fascinating Sirk film that ought to be better known: www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...

Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Joanna Hogg for not only blurbing it, but also using it as a prop in a short film she made about props: www.ft.com/content/4f5d...

Elena Gorfinkel and JD Rhodes offer a theory of the film prop, from Sirk's bric-a-brac, to sexploitation's living rooms, to Risky Business's crystal egg, and beyond. This is the first in a new series of short books for cinephiles, examining a single object, technique, or motif across film history.

Here's the back cover and flaps.