Epigram #0 - Boo

The Haunted Playground is home to the Haunted Playground Epigrams — a series of scholarly essays, pamphlets, and occasional monographs that bypass the metrics-obsessed, whimsy-averse culture of modern academic publishing. This is a home for insurrectionist scholarship - for those who reject the treadmill of prestige publishing. We are all lovers of academia as a tradition, but critical of academia as a neoliberal institution. Submissions to the Epigrams are expected to be idiosyncratic, provocative, and thoughtful. Above all, they should be fun. They should give in to play. They should spill the tea.

This is an intellectual outcropping of the wider Institutional Quixotism movement. We refuse to accept as inevitable the erosion of eccentric scholarship. That is your birthright as imaginative thinkers in a system that once rewarded weirdness.

We have no deadlines. We publish as and when. We have no set expectations on form or format. Your work belongs to you.

If you're on the promotions treadmill, then you shouldn't consider this your primary venue. But it turns out that if you want to start up a publishing house there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop you.

Why Haunted Playground?

We are the caretakers of the darlings they told you to kill. The dead ideas you believed in so passionately when nobody believed in you? Well, maybe you can find fellow believers here. We conduct a seance with the work that does not find safe harbour in formal academic venues. Maybe you prematurely buried something important on the say-so of cynics and 'realists'. Perhaps it's time to see if its ghosts still want to play.

Epigrams, by definition, are very short. Epigram #1 is 14,000 words!

Chalk it up to whimsy. They're as long, or as short, as they need to be. We chose 'epigrams' to describe our catalog because we look for the interesting, the memorable, the surprising, the satirical, the witty, and the wry. We just choose to interpret the more traditional 'brief' quality as an optional extra.