I Felt as if I were Walking Through a Hollow Diamond

JAYME RUSSELL: The plastic covering has pulled up from the spine and also the middle of the book’s cover. It is what you see first when you look at this book, as well as the menacing dinosaur shrouded in these misty bubbles. Yet, if you hold the book at a certain angle you can also see a billowing volcano filling the giant cavern with a sky of reddish-grey smoke, giant trees towering so high that they seem to bend, and rocks of different textures and colors. These things, that you can barely see, are what the book is really about.

Mise (Marvel) en abyme

JESÚS COSTANTINO: But what if Ms. Marvel’s message had instead been stuck in the Dead Letter Office for the entire month of November? What if all copies of Ms. Marvel #13 were sitting with other dead letters and parcels in a room in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Jacques Derrida had first seen “an inscription barely erased on a wall” marking the place where dead letters are “kept for a period, after which dead letters are destroyed”? This might explain why, in the wake of the election, Kamala’s image and her various messages have proliferated and been adopted by feminist and pro-immigrant activists.

Dead places seeing Dead names Dead tasting stone Dead games: On The Book of the Dead by Orikuchi Shinobu (translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles)

Jace Brittain: The pattern of obfuscation and analogous webs extends to an endlessly astounding figurative compulsion in The Book of the Dead, a compulsion toward sensory bleeding and complex synesthesias. Just as the lips of a dead lover might smell like a hue, one might “hear the moon sliding across the sky” at the same moment that a mountain’s trees “stir noiselessly.”