Why do so many Americans drive for miles each autumn to buy a vegetable that they are unlikely to eat? While most people around the world eat pumpkin throughout the year, North Americans reserve it for holiday pies and other desserts that celebrate the harvest season and the rural past. They decorate their houses with pumpkins every autumn and welcome Halloween trick-or-treaters with elaborately carved jack-o'-lanterns. Towns hold annual pumpkin festivals featuring giant pumpkins and carvi...

The Underground World of Beasleyville takes you through the life and adventures of a baby mouse, captured and released into the desert by people who live above ground called Topsiders. He finds adventure and friendship in an underground family of gophers as they collect things they need to run their town, that Topsiders leave out in their yard, and eventually leads him back to his own family.

The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional colle...

“Your body needs what only I can give it, doesn’t it, little mama? It needs my seed. My strength. My domination.”-CahressWhen Duri asks her best friend to service her during her first heat, she never expects it to result in pregnancy, but she vows to cherish and protect the new life growing in her womb with every ounce of her omega heart. So, to celebrate her transition into motherhood, she boards a space cruise and prepar...