punctum 🌈 books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion
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punctumbooks.bsky.social
punctum 🌈 books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion
@punctumbooks.bsky.social
punctum books is a queer, scholar-led Open Access press devoted to creative modes of inquiry across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. Affiliated with UC-Santa Barbara Library & funded by university libraries across the globe. https://punctumbooks.com
What if a psychiatric hospital eliminated locks & restraints, shared governance with its patients & opened its grounds as a public park? It happened in Italy in the 1960s & the doctors & patients wrote this book together.

#OpenAccess & FREE to download.

tinyurl.com/yxn4mb9z
November 5, 2025 at 8:14 PM
punctum books, founded in Brooklyn in 2011, celebrates Mamdani’s victory in NYC. To the 1M+ NYC voters who said they would leave the city if he won, please don’t let the door hit you on the way out. 🎉🥳🍾
November 5, 2025 at 1:34 PM
punctum’s headquarters for the Charleston Conference! #chsconf2025
November 4, 2025 at 6:14 PM
The Open Book Collective @openbookcollective.bsky.social is LIVE at the Charleston Conference from 10am to 5pm today! Come chat all things community-led #OpenAccess book publishing with Livy Snyder & Eileen Joy.

Grab a Thoth bag and punctum bookmarks while you’re at it!

#chsconf2025
November 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
In the age of extinction, when AI bots have swarmed the ramparts, trillionaires head for off-planet bunkers & our dependency upon unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism has hobbled us, this is your survival manual.

ONTOHACKERS: #OpenAccess & FREE to download.

tinyurl.com/2cvuf5cn
November 3, 2025 at 3:38 PM
It’s #NationalCatDay and we’re remembering Lucy, punctum’s office muse, who sailed to Valhalla this past July at the age of 17. She didn’t break the mold; she was the mold.
October 29, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Our Director Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy will be at Sonoma State University Library tomorrow for #OpenAccess Week to moderate a panel with SSU faculty in multiple disciplines on “Who Owns Our Knowledge”? The panel will be available via Zoom. Join us!
October 23, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Our Director Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy will be at Sonoma State University Library tomorrow for #OpenAccess Week to moderate a panel with SSU faculty in multiple disciplines on “Who Owns Our Knowledge”? The panel will be available via Zoom. Join us!
October 22, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Director Eileen Joy yukking it up with @georgemasonu.bsky.social librarians (Anne Osterman, Meg Meiman, Alok Yadav & Emilie Algenio) & #OpenAccess publishers @charleswatkinson.bsky.social & Peter Potter @paradigmpubserv.bsky.social at GMU's Center for the Humanities to discuss OA books last Friday.
October 20, 2025 at 7:05 PM
punctum Co-Director Vincent van Gerven Oei and punctum author Sawako Nakayasu confabbing in Tokyo!

Check out Nakayasu's book THE ANTS here -- "the distance, the break, and the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton" -- which is #FREE to download:

punctumbooks.com/titles/the-a...
October 20, 2025 at 5:04 PM
"A landmark text at a moment when a new conversation about what it means to inhabit this land together is so desperately needed." ~Lyndsey Stonebridge

CROSSINGS: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms

#OpenAccess & FREE to download:

tinyurl.com/2s3686hm

#immigration #migrancy #dispossessions
October 15, 2025 at 7:56 PM
CROSSINGS: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms shows how the arts & the humanities can meet the ethical demands that the reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments & institutions have failed to do.

PUBLISHED #OpenAccess & FREE to download!

tinyurl.com/2s3686hm
October 9, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Are the executive orders getting you down? Caught between $100,000 immigration visas & making federal architecture beautiful again? You NEED the People's EXECUTIVE ORDERS:

By the fleece vested in us, we hereby order a freezer cake!

#OpenAccess & FREE to download:

tinyurl.com/zsrat342
October 6, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Happy #Caturday!

*artwork by Matt McCarthy, mrmattmccarthy.com
October 5, 2025 at 7:47 PM
CROSSINGS: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms shows how the arts & the humanities can meet the ethical demands that the reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments & institutions have failed to do.

PUBLISHED #OpenAccess & FREE to download!

tinyurl.com/2s3686hm
October 3, 2025 at 8:27 PM
Bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, orgies, missing children, Mickey Mouse, zombies, Nazis, shock therapy, surf music & the psycho-history of the 20th century.

COMING THIS FALL: a new, updated edition of Laurence Rickels's 1991 THE CASE OF CALIFORNIA:

tinyurl.com/4um26dza
October 2, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Once the soul leaves the body, he will not fly to the monstrous shrine where all the war dead went & continue to go, but to that farm by the river where white shy herons glide in the quiet sky.

Read IMAGINARY DEATH by Mariko Nagai, published #OpenAccess & FREE to download:

tinyurl.com/4nhr37xx
September 30, 2025 at 7:03 PM
HAPPY #CATURDAY!
September 27, 2025 at 9:11 PM
In the tradition of Agee & Evans’s "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," IMAGINARY DEATH is part meditation, part history & part memory fragments, telling a story of a Japanese soldier’s life and death during World War II.

#OpenAccess & FREE to download:

tinyurl.com/4nhr37xx

#trauma #war #history
September 26, 2025 at 8:20 PM
How to puncture prevalent European understandings of the Mediterranean? The colonizing impulse inscribed in Western historiography can't be undone by adding previously repressed & unacknowledged histories.

THE MEDITERRANEAN QUESTION: new coordinates for another Mediterranean.

tinyurl.com/yv9svw25
September 24, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Insisting that present knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, THE MEDITERRANEAN QUESTION casts a critical light on the deeper African & Asian Mediterranean(s) that have been obscured in Western histories & archives.

PUBLISHED #OpenAccess!

DOWNLOAD: tinyurl.com/yv9svw25
September 17, 2025 at 7:34 PM
New bookmarks! We’ll be giving these away at Charleston Conference in Nov. 2025, MLA meeting in Toronto in Jan. 2026, and AWP meeting in Baltimore in March 2026. #OpenAccess #books
September 15, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Insisting that present knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, THE MEDITERRANEAN QUESTION casts a critical light on the deeper African & Asian Mediterranean(s) that have been obscured in Western histories & archives.

OUT TODAY #OpenAccess:

tinyurl.com/yv9svw25
September 11, 2025 at 6:27 PM
THREE reading & performance events in NYC to celebrate @LynneSachs1 & Lizzie Olesker's HAND BOOK: A Manual on Performance, Process & the Labor of Laundry:

SEP. 8: Unnameable Books
SEP. 13: Printed Matter @MOMA, PS1
SEP. 28: Torn Page

Download FREE #OpenAccess book here: tinyurl.com/um49y59n
September 3, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Found in dumpling soups & remembered from childhood, ants trail through the “industry of survival,” exploring interfaces of love, ambition & strategy.

PUBLISHED #OpenAccess: THE ANTS: the distance, the break & the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton & endoskeleton!

tinyurl.com/bdhatcxk
August 28, 2025 at 4:47 PM