Thoth Archiving Network Pilot at Cambridge
Cambridge University Library (CUL) is piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, which will allow small presses to use a simple deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations, creating the opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their open books catalogue, should they cease to operate.
This is a pilot repository site hosting open access books by a range of publishers depositing content in Thoth. This site is maintained and managed by the Open Research Systems Team at Cambridge University Library (CUL).
More information about this pilot and the Open Book Futures Project is available at this page.
Open Book Futures
Recent Submissions
My 1980s Gayboy Playlist
(punctum books, 2026-08-11) Ashby, Arved
In this remarkably intimate book, My 1980s Gayboy Playlist, award-winning music writer Arved Ashby muses over pieces that impacted his sexual and musical awakenings as a troubled gay adolescent—pieces by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Alban Berg, Prince, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Petty.
Ashby shares memories both intimate and far-ranging, but My 1980s Gayboy Playlist is not a memoir. Instead of trying to amplify an outwardly uneventful life, the author reengages with and renegotiates eight still-simmering touchpoints—some old musical flames, a few abusive relationships among them. Ashby focuses on desire as it spilled messily across different avenues of expression, seeking connections between erotic experience and musical passion.
For Ashby, as a high school student in a small, rural Midwestern town in the early 1980s, choosing Alban Berg records over Van Halen counted as a perversion. When he recognized Tchaikovsky’s melodic fixations and Prince’s and Chopin’s musical fires, he better understood his own kinks. As an inadequate piano student and a shy virgin on tricyclic psych meds, his lack of physical success taught him the limitations of the body but also showed the capaciousness of queer failure.
It was music that showed him how queerness insists on misappropriation, mishearing, and reading against the grain. Musicality, like sexual expression, amounts to a kind of role-playing— involving penetration and violation of identity as well as validations of the self. The author’s queer musical loves have shown him the vital beauty of muck, unreason, and noise, and as an imaginative writer, Ashby offers the liquid self-reflexivity of Proust and the auto-theory provocations of Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado, and McKenzie Wark. His prose is poetic and playful, and now and again chaotic. He outs himself in and through his work, with humor and radical intimacy.
My 1980s Gayboy Playlist ultimately illuminates what queer theorist Leo Bersani called the gayboy’s inelegant “apprenticeship in desiring.” Ashby’s closest partners growing up were fantasy, seclusion, and music-dependency, and he found his awkward bliss at the start of the era that witnessed AIDS and the rise of the Moral Majority. In Ashby’s early exurban environment, gayness was a thing feared, because unseen and unfathomed, but his musical intimacies made his personal closet endurable. They also helped him to survive his mis-education, to overcome failures of expression, and to craft a sexual awakening into something more rich and more strange.
Applied Psychology in Context: Stories and Lessons from Palestinian Villages
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-04) Hakim, Caesar; McLeod, Hamish J; Alkhatib, Mohammad
This book is an innovative, practice-oriented resource that reframes how psychology is applied in complex, real-world settings. Grounded in the lived realities of Palestine, it uses a distinctive ‘village’ framework to guide readers through key domains of psychological practice; including assessment, diagnosis, therapeutic work, and post-crisis intervention. A central contribution of the book is the introduction of the Collapse Restoration Framework, an original approach to understanding psychological collapse and its counter, restoration, in contexts of prolonged conflict, occupation, and systemic instability. Through narrative storytelling, reflective exercises, and culturally responsive theory, the book bridges the gap between standardised psychological models and the demands of working in high-complexity, underserved environments. Rooted in a psychodynamic orientation, it offers a deeply human, relational approach to care while equipping readers with practical tools for professional development and inclusive practice. Designed for trainees, early-career practitioners, and educators, it emphasises ethical practice, critical thinking, and contextual awareness. By centring Palestinian experiences within global mental health, it makes an essential and accessible contribution to contemporary applied psychology.
Unvoicing Migraine: A Study of the Failing Voice
(punctum books, 2026-08-21) Broeckmeyer, Mariske
These writings spring from an observation: When migraine arises, the voice fails. It does so on many levels, ranging from a vocal-technical disintegration to migraine-specific symptoms like dysarthria and aphasia, up to the muteness forced upon the sufferer by stigmatization. As a migraine-suffering singer, Mariske Broeckmeyer witnesses and experiences these alterations. Frequently, routinely, and almost faithfully, she retreats to the blackened bedroom when migraine manifests. Lying in silence, she notices how little of her vocal instrument remains intact and how distorted our relations become under these circumstances. Migraine mutes—it occupies the body and leaves muscles, lungs, larynx, and tongue under its command. In the attempt to describe these sufferings, Broeckmeyer has indeed stammered and fallen silent, unable to name the pain. But could it be that this failure holds some sort of potential? What might vocal failure reveal about the nature of the voice?
To these questions, Unvoicing Migraine lends an ear. Shuttling between theoretical findings and artistic practice, the book turns to concepts provided by voice theory, disability studies, and queer theory to engage in an artistic research that studies the devocalizing impact of migraine. The book also attempts to redefine the artistic practice of a singer, the author, when her vocal apparatus falters: it questions the singer’s relation to the stage and challenges the boundaries of performance. These aspects of vocality were not merely approached through an autotheoretical discourse, but through the creation of music and sound art that capture the failing voice and amplify it. Ultimately, Unvoicing Migraine looks at what lies beyond migraine, and makes note of its consequences and residues: stains the acid left on the carpet that transform into a woolly eye whose gaze morphs into a mouth that raves in a language we cannot always understand, but which Broeckmeyer transforms into migraine opera.
The Doctrine of One: Personal Encounters with Film, Art and Music
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-19) Beckerman, Michael
This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Josef Váchal, to the deeply personal resonances of Schubert’s chamber music, Dvořák’s cello concerto, and Gideon Klein’s tragic Terezín Trio. Across these vivid case studies, the author asks whether meaning in art can ever be shared—or whether it always belongs to the individual observer.
Rejecting academic rigidity Michael Beckerman celebrates the ‘splitters’—those who honor specificity, subjectivity, and the singular force of a personal response. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book offers both a philosophical inquiry and a passionate defense of individuality in an age of conformity. It will captivate readers of musicology, cultural studies, and philosophy alike—anyone who has ever wondered what it truly means to interpret a work of art.
African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil's Eclogues
(punctum books, 2026-08-28) Whitaker, Richard
African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues presents a fresh and unexpected version of the ten pastoral poems that comprise the Eclogues of Virgil (70–19 BCE). Although these poems focus on the lives of shepherds and goatherds, Virgil makes their seemingly circumscribed existence a mirror of the wider world, a world that is both his and ours. The Eclogues deal with subjects that remain vital in the twenty-first century: erotic passion of many varieties, transformation and metamorphosis, the torments of unhappy love, and the nature and power of poetry (represented by different kinds of pastoral song). With striking originality, Virgil also allowed contemporary power politics to erupt into the world of his herders and small-scale farmers, as they face confiscation of their grazing lands and fields.
South African classicist and translator Richard Whitaker has produced eminently fluent and creative versions of Virgil’s Eclogues. He reimagines the poems in an African landscape and evokes the troubled history of land dispossession in southern Africa, introducing local equivalents for much of Virgil’s Mediterranean flora and fauna and making frequent use of words drawn from indigenous languages that have enriched his country’s variety of English.
African Pastoral includes stunning images by South African artist William Kentridge, which interact with the versions of Virgilian pastoral in multiple ways, complementing and illuminating the poems, as well as raising points of contrast and difference between ancient and modern contexts.
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