Josh Russell’s new chapbook, a finalist for the 2025 NMP/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest, Commonplaces, essays, print copy + included PDF.
PREORDER (chapbook ships 3/10/26).
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Here’s a sample for you:
For Theodor Adorno
Rare is the teenage son who thinks his father’s Frankfurt School sociology books are cool. I listened to my dad’s LPs when I was a little kid, but at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen no way I was dropping the needle on Chuck Berry or John Lee Hooker. Instead: cassettes of ABC and Madness and Big Country and Run DMC and the soundtrack to Beat Street. There was also no way I was going to read about how some tedious philosopher hated saxophones when I had Vonnegut and a fat omnibus of 1930s boys’ aviation adventure stories my mom bought me at a library sale. In 1933 the Nazis revoked Adorno’s right to teach, and he went into exile—England, New York, Los Angeles—until 1949, when he returned to Frankfurt. In the summer of 1969, while Adorno stood at the front of a Goethe University hall, trying to lecture on dialectical thinking, a student wrote on the chalkboard If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease, and three of that student’s female classmates came to the lectern, bared their breasts, and tossed flower petals onto the old professor who’d called some of their friends stormtroopers in jeans. He died before the fall term began. I was one year old that summer. My dad spent a dozen years teaching sociology in Bloomington, Normal, and Highland Heights before he left academia. No student ever took off her shirt or threw petals at him or blamed him for capitalism’s continuation—I asked. In Minima Moralia Adorno writes In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. Here’s the thing: It’s underdogs all the way down.
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$10 + $5 shipping (US orders; email us for a quote if you’re overseas) for print + PDF!
