Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish the second edition of Chris Campanioni’s celebrated cross-genre work, A and B and Also Nothing. The title, which was originally published through Otis Books’ Seismicity Editions, is scheduled for release in summer 2023. The second edition includes a new coda and photographs by the author, and has been completely redesigned to highlight the episodic nature of the text.
In A and B and Also Nothing, Campanioni explores fundamental questions about American identity, and how to re-write it in the cultural context of today. He reads and recasts his own life through the works of Henry James and Gertrude Stein, doing so with an amalgam of annotations, observations, aphorisms, and asides. The work dissolves the boundaries between journal and novel, autobiography and fiction.
“I draw from my everyday experiences and those passed on, even as silence, from my parents as exiles to investigate the ways in which migrant illegality has been fabricated and shaped, and how this informs a critical evaluation of technology’s role in capturing and containing bodies in life and text,” Campanioni said. “I hope the book offers a fresh blueprint for American identity.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “Chris’s work is as bold and daring as it is timely and relevant.” A and B and Also Nothing advances a notebook poetics that centers copying, collection, and recollection as primary creative acts. “In Chris’s fluid, lyrical sequences, the vital roles of migration, dislocation, and exile in America’s literary and intellectual genealogy get restored,” Davis said.
Called “a brilliant manifesto-aria” by prolific author and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, A and B and Also Nothing has previously earned exceptional reviews from Harvard Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Its first edition was a bestseller.
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985 and grew up in New Jersey. His research connecting media studies with studies of migration has been awarded a Mellon Foundation fellowship and the Calder Prize and his writing has received the International Latino Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. He lives in Brooklyn.
