Uplift Your Gifts
Last-Minute Solutions and New Year's Resolutions.
Whether you’re looking for last minute Christmas gifts or you have a gift card you need to burn, I have a few recommendations.
Have you been reading this newsletter, yet still wondering about one of the books I’m always yammering on about? Now’s your chance to indulge us both.
Here’s a quick run down of all of my recent books.
Different Waves, Different Depths
My debut collection of short fiction, Different Waves, Different Depths, contains nine stories, varying in style from the literarily weird to the science fiction and in length from the flash to the novella. The last story in the book, “Fender the Fall,” is about Chris Bridges, a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save her life and his marriage. As you might expect, the plan doesn’t go as planned. Tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back.
“Working the borderlands between philosophy, sci-fi, and ultra-contemporary social critique, these stories illuminate our strange cusp moment in a deeply humanistic and bracing manner. A sharp, propulsive, and canny collection.”
— David Leo Rice
discontents
My friends Patrick Barber, Craig Gates, and I put together the pilot issue of a new zine called discontents. The content covers the usual concerns: music, movies, books, and poetry. We reached out to all of our old zine-era friends, so it includes writing by Cynthia Connolly, Peter Relic, Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Fatboi Sharif, Timothy Baker, and Greg Pratt, artwork by Zak Sally and Tae Won You, as well as work by Patrick, Craig, and myself. Subjects include Ceremony, Unwound, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Crestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and others. Fifty full pages of stoke!
The first 100 folded-and-stapled copies went fast, but it’s now available in a perfect-bound print-on-demand version.
Boogie Down Predictions
While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (see below), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor Press) is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.
“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Escape Philosophy
Using extreme examples from heavy metal music and science fiction and horror movies, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (punctum books) is a survey of all the ways we try to shuck off the shackles of our physical forms.
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
There’s a new edition of Escape Philosophy forthcoming from Repeater Books! The new expanded and updated edition, now called Post-Self, includes new additions to every chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, and a new Afterword by me. More on that project in the new year!
Follow for Now, Vol. 2
My second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 (punctum books), picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.
“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Oh, there’s an updated version of Follow for Now, Vol. 2 coming out next year from Impeller Press! More on that soon.
Abandoned Accounts
When the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects. In the months before, I’d started writing silly little poems about odd memories I had, tiny stories that didn’t fit anywhere else. I went back to those when I couldn’t think any larger. I eventually moved on to short stories and finally back to book-length writing, but not before I amassed a small pile of poems.
Abandoned Accounts (First Cut Poetry) collects those silly memories I started writing down, including reflections of walks in the woods at my parents’ house in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama, encounters with favorite bands and somewhat famous people, tales of travel and intrigue, and a few stray poems from as far back as 1990. It was an unexpected project, and I’m really proud of the results.
“Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. It’s a joy to read.” — Bristol Noir
Dead Precedents
My book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books) takes in the ground-breaking work of DJs and emcees, alongside writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture. It’s a counter-cultural history of the twenty-first century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world in which we now live. It’s really dope!
“A book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”
— Samuel R. Delany
“Written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic.” — Dan Hancox, The Guardian
Follow for Now
My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. It’s an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.
“This book is an exotic plant with roots sucking nutrients from the skulls of the most interesting people on the planet. Prepare to be pollinated.”
— Mark Frauenfelder, bOING-bOING
More!
In addition to the two new editions mentioned above, I also have two whole new books coming out next year!
The University of Georgia Press is publishing my post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture! No less a reader than William Gibson says, “Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”
Also, Repeater Books are putting out my book about allusions in media, The Grand Allusion! I’m still writing that one, but here’s a bit about it:
The Grand Allusion
I’ve been studying and writing about allusions since Matt McGlone pointed me toward them when I took his graduate class on metaphor at the University of Texas at Austin. I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on the use of allusion in rap lyrics, and I’ve wanted to expand the idea ever since.
So, 2025 is going to be a big year around here! I hope it’s a big one for you, too!
Thank you for your continued support!
Merry Christmas,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com