What We Are Learning (2010)

For two years (2008-2009), What We Are Learning issued a monthly compendium of brief reports from several dozen friends, telling what each of them had learned recently. This book gathers their reports into a uniquely compelling narrative that displaces the drama of the individual with the pleasures of the collective. What We Are Learning is one of the most provocative and successful experiments in dispersed authorship that we have seen.

Edited by Sam Lohmann, Colin Beattie and Alyse Emdur
Publisher Jank Editions, Portland, OR
ISBN 9781935662112
133 pages

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Carmela Ciuraru: Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms (2011)

What’s in a name?

In our “look at me” era, everyone’s a brand. Privacy now seems a quaint relic, and self-effacement is a thing of the past. Yet, as Nom de Plume reminds us, this was not always the case. Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.

Biographies have chronicled the lives of pseudonymous authors such as Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, and George Eliot, but never before have the stories behind many noms de plume been collected into a single volume. These are narratives of secrecy, obsession, modesty, scandal, defiance, and shame: Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The “three weird sisters” (as they were called by the poet Ted Hughes) from Yorkshire—the Brontes—produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand.

Grounded by research yet highly accessible and engaging, these provocative, astonishing stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities—sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. A wide-ranging examination of pseudonyms both familiar and obscure, Nom de Plume is part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

Publisher HarperCollins, 2011
P. S. Series
ISBN 0061735264, 9780061735264
368 pages

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…ment Journal, 3: Frag…ment (On Authorship) (2012)

“Issue 3 of …ment investigates the current debates and practices surrounding the concept of authorship and the possible modes of resistance attached to it. Looking at broad topics such as intellectual property, collectivity, knowledge production and technology, this issue is concerned with the re-articulation of such themes in a transforming political landscape. What is an author and how do we understand authorship and its politics?”

Contributors: Erica Baum, Gavin Brown, Federica Bueti, Federico Campagna, Övül Dormusoglu, Freee, Marc Garrett,Pedro Neves-Marques, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Vanessa Place, Jan Verwoert, Caleb Waldorf.

…ment: Journal for Contemporary Culture, Art and Politics, Issue 3 – Spring/Summer 2012
Editor-in-chief: Federica Bueti
Editors: Benoit Loiseau, Clara Meister
64 pages

launch of the issue (3 May 2012, London)

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