We are happy to announce that word/image territories Publishing House has published Histories of Touch. The authors of the book are: Karol Gromek, a doctoral student in the Doctoral School of Humanities at UAM, and Marcelina Obarska, a doctoral student in the Doctoral School of Humanities at UW.
From the promotional materials of the słowo/obraz terytoria Publishing House:
We dipped our hands into the heated grass, into the hot sand, into the dog hair, into the fragrant foam and into the bellies of plush animals, thinking of nothing but simple, banal pleasures. Our fingers were feelers seeking pleasure. I thought for a long time that this was the love of life, but someone told me that this was its perfect opposite. “A pantomime dissected into a few repetitive gestures, this is how I imagine hell,” you say, “as a compulsion to constantly reach for pleasure.
Stories of Touch is a collection of 702 fragments devoted to the titular sense. Moving at the intersection of poetic prose and philosophical essay, the authors describe the simple and tender touches that come to mind first, but also those that are difficult, forgotten, overlooked or silenced. The open structure of the passages does not impose a reading style. One can read them linearly or wander among them – like on a map that does not indicate the only path.