Avidly Reads
- ACLU Handbook Series
- Alternative Criminology
- America and the Long 19th Century
- American History and Culture
- Animals in Context
- Anthropologies of American Medicine
- Avidly Reads
- Biopolitics
- Black Power Series
- Children and Youth in America
- Citizenship and Migration in the Americas
- Clay Sanskrit Library
- Connected Youth and Digital Futures
- Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies
- Critical America
- Critical Cultural Communication
- Critical Perspectives on Youth
- Cultural Front
- Culture, Labor, History
- Early American Places
- Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies Series
- Essential Papers on Jewish Studies
- Essential Papers on Psychoanalysis
- Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society
- Families, Law, and Society
- Gender and Political Violence
- Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History
- Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
- Intersections
- Jewish Studies in the Twenty-First Century
- Keywords
- Latina/o Sociology
- Library of Arabic Literature
- Modern and Contemporary Catholicism
- Nation of Nations
- New and Alternative Religions
- New Perspectives in Crime, Deviance, and Law
- New Perspectives on Jewish Studies
- New York Voices
- NOMOS – American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
- North American Religions
- NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis
- Performance and American Cultures
- Perspectives on Political Violence
- Possible Futures
- Postmillennial Pop
- Psychology and Crime
- Psychology and the Law
- Qualitative Studies in Psychology
- Qualitative Studies in Religion
- Religion and Social Transformation
- Religion, Race, and Ethnicity
- Secular Studies
- Sexual Cultures
- Social Science Research Council
- Social Transformations in American Anthropology
- The American Social Experience
- The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice
- The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman
- The History of Disability
- The Works of Charles Darwin
- U.S.-China Relations
- Warfare and Culture
- Women in Religions
- Youth, Crime, and Justice
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Each volume in this series will explore the surprising or counterintuitive pleasures and revulsions of a single cultural experience, phenomenon, or artifact. Written in the “Avidly voice,” a charismatic blend of knowledge, affect, and enthusiasm, the books will offer narratives in which authors account for, and even savor, their own emotional relationships to the subjects they explore. These emotional relationships — enthusiast, apologist, idealist, grouch — are central cultural forces that are difficult to capture within the objective tone of most academic writing. Avidly Reads, on the other hand, invites writers to indulge feelings, and to tell stories, in the casual idioms that distinguish the best conversations about culture.
The Avidly Reads volumes will not only account for pleasure but will themselves be pleasurable — for their authors to write, as well as for others to read. Emotions enliven the writing we support, propel it towards wider audiences, and kindle more luminous reader experiences. Slim volumes of around 30,000 words featuring a signature design, books in the Avidly Reads series will be attractive to readers whether in the coffee shop, classroom, book club, or bar.
Forthcoming projects
In Avidly Reads: Theory, Jordan Alexander Stein tells his own personal history of “reading theory in the 90s” by confronting a seeming contradiction: that the abstract and often anxiety- and frustration-producing rigors of “theory,” created, for him and his friends, an entirely different range of emotions: intimate, tender, nourishing. Organized around five ways that reading theory makes you feel — silly, stupid, sexy, seething, stuck — this book travels back to the late-90s to tell a story of friends coming of age at a particular but still resonant moment in the emotional life of American ideas.
Writer and critic Eric Thurm’s Avidly Reads: Board Games is also about the strange ways communities get made and unmade around an activity — playing board games, rather than reading books — that nominally serves a different function. Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a gamer to limn the borders of the emotional and social rules that board games create and reveal, and tells a series of stories about the pastime that’s closest to his own family, thinking through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and parsing the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies, values, and relationships on multiple scales, from the familial to the geopolitical.
Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Avidly Reads: Making Out is the most intimate of our first batch of books. Stockton tells a story about kissing — as she fantasized about it in her childhood and finds pleasure in it in her adulthood. Her story merges the multiple valences of the phrase “making out”: kissing, interpreting, and surviving, as a young queer person growing up without models of what it meant to be intimate, be a queer self, in the world. Tracing her experiences as a child at the nascence of the modern queer movement but substantially prior to its contemporary recognition of trans life, allows Stockton, a leading scholar of queer studies, to offer a personal history of how the emerging concepts of queer social and intellectual life trickled into human experience through the act and witnessing of the kiss.
More here!
SERIES EDITORS
Sarah Mesle, University of Southern California
Sarah Blackwood, Pace University
Submissions can be sent here.