Story meets scholarship.
BOOKS & COLLECTIONS
Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body (2025)
Enter the seductive and dangerous world of Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 with Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast. In this in-depth cultural study, Brian A. Dixon explores the integral role of the human body in Bond’s adventures, delving into the literature, films, artwork, and advertising associated with the world’s most celebrated secret agent.
Examining the familiar accoutrements of the 007 adventures—including often elaborate references to fashion, food and drink, sex, and methods of execution—Dixon uncovers their profound significance. Each detail accentuates an unwavering focus on the body, revealing the extent to which these narratives are products of their unique cultural and historical moments and the way in which they foretold the future of politics, culture, sexuality, and consumerism.
The body of James Bond represents—then, now, and later—the body politic in its portrayal of what we were, are, and may well be. The appetites of the unforgettable characters who populate his thrilling adventures—for food, power, sex, and killing—are our appetites. Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body exposes the ways in which Ian Fleming’s popular fiction and the unending film series it inspired offer a performance of those cultural fears, anxieties, hopes, and desires grounded in the body, assuring James Bond’s status as an incomparably influential cultural icon.
Hardcover. 254 Pages. ISBN 978-09883922-6-7
Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis (2024)
The United States of America—its politics, its culture, and its identity—is often framed as an evolving conversation about the nature of freedom. The word “freedom” is ubiquitous in political rhetoric, patriotic songs, advertising, and activism. Conflicts in American life typically revolve around questions of what it means to be free, who gets to be free, the limitations of freedom, and the problems and paradoxes associated with freedom.
In the twenty-first century, in a time of social media, digital surveillance, climate change, pandemic management, autocratic politicians, and evolving attitudes about race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, the old question of what freedom truly entails calls for new answers, new ways of thinking, and even new ways of being free. In this time of crisis, it is imperative that democratic populations engage in earnest and open-ended discourse about what freedom means, how it is defined, and what it looks like.
Figures of Freedom answers the call. This provocative and thought-provoking collection of essays by an international team of scholars invites readers to witness how recent literary, filmic, and televisual narratives have represented and reimagined themes of personal and political agency in the context of twenty-first-century aspirations and anxieties. In various ways, films as diverse as Bird Box, Toy Story, and Pacific Rim, television series such as Mad Men and Mr. Robot, and novels such as DeLillo’s Zero K, Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, and Millet’s A Children’s Bible all present characters who grapple with classical questions of freedom against a recognizably contemporary backdrop of terror, tyranny, technology, and apocalypse. Together, they reveal what twenty-first-century narratives can teach us about how the idea of freedom has been expanded, distorted, and reimagined in contemporary fiction.
Paperback. 322 Pages. ISBN 978-0-9883922-4-3
“Laist and Dixon compel us to consider our own understanding of freedom... and how these ideas are shaped and shifted by the world around us...”
—New Books in Political Science
Back to Frank Black: A Return to Chris Carter’s Millennium (2012)
In 1996, a groundbreaking television drama debuted on the Fox network to 18 million viewers and widespread critical acclaim. Created by Chris Carter, Millennium tells the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a legendary forensic profiler gifted with the ability to see into the minds of killers. Through his work as a consultant with the F.B.I. and the mysterious Millennium Group, the series offers a thoughtful exploration of the nature and manifestations of evil in the modern world. Millennium ran for three seasons and sixty-seven episodes but its story does not end there.
Back to Frank Black offers an unprecedented volume of material exploring this landmark series. With forewords from lead actor Lance Henriksen and co-executive producer Frank Spotnitz and an introduction by series creator Chris Carter, the collection features extensive interviews with key cast and crew as well as essays analyzing Millennium's characters, themes, and enduring legacy written by a number of authors with in-depth knowledge of the series. Inspired by the growing movement to return this iconic hero to the screen, Back to Frank Black finds its focus in an incomparable figure of hope: Frank Black. We need him now more than ever.
The volume includes interviews with Chris Carter, Lance Henriksen, Frank Spotnitz, Megan Gallagher, Glen Morgan, James Wong, Kristen Cloke, Erin Maher, Kay Reindl, Mark Snow, Sarah-Jane Redmond, Michael R. Perry, Thomas J. Wright, Robert McLachlan, Chip Johannessen, and Klea Scott.
Hardcover. 512 Pages. ISBN 978-0-9883922-8-1
Paperback. 512 Pages. ISBN 978-0-9883922-9-8
“A true treasure for Millennium fans... This is a book I will be dipping into for many years to come.”
—Wired
Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009)
14 September 1776. Prime Minister William Pitt proposes the Columbia Compromise, unifying the Kingdom of Great Britain and her colonies and establishing a framework for North American representation in Parliament. The American War of Independence is over before it begins. This is the history of British North America.
Rule Britannia! Nominated for the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, this ambitious anthology features nine original stories from six authors. Each imaginative tale delves into events along the timeline between this point of divergence from established history up to the present day, from the uncertainty of early colonial conflicts to the devastation on the front line of the War of Wars, from the politics underpinning a British mission to land a man on the moon to rivalry on the cricket grounds of New England. Accompanied by extensive appendices including maps, biographies, letters and diaries, they collectively describe an alternate history of the sisterhood between a very British North America and Great Britain, the story of Columbia & Britannia.
The book features original fiction from Brian A. Dixon, Joe Tangari, Mark Beech, C. Mitchell O’Neal, Alexander Zelenyj, and Adam Chamberlain.
Nominated for the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Hardcover. 448 Pages. ISBN: 978-0-615-33464-6
Paperback. 406 Pages. ISBN: 978-0-615-33327-4
“An interesting and well-thought-out addition to the subgenre of alternate history as well as the shared-world anthology…”
—Steven H Silver