The Goths & Other Stories, Punctum Books 2020 (1st ed.), 2023 (2nd ed.)
The Goths and Other Stories is a collection of short works at the intersection of prose fiction, experimental poetry, philosophy, and design theory. The book’s six stories are set in different times and places—sometimes within the same narrative—but have in common a slippery approach to the boundaries between fiction and theory, between ontological planes, between the comical and the moral. Together they also form a treatise on the nature of writing as a branch of design—one whose medium is easier to reveal than to define.
Readers of all centuries will feel at home in this book. An apocalypse of tax law and classical mythology will quietly descends upon their living room and reveal to them a medieval theology of design, theatre, and light.
In The Diary of Anna Comnena, Zamler-Carhart impersonates the 12th-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena as she comes out as trans and tries to write her father’s imperial biography, The Alexiad, while in exile in contemporary West Africa.
Outside the Empire, elevators stop on strange floors, and Anna’s first-person diary careens down a series of sinister intersectional magic spaces, where the dynamics of West African vernacular theatre, animal husbandry, jihad, urban design, television, and coin metallurgy are all analyzed from the perspective of a 12th-century trans Byzantine engineer.
The Diary of Anna Comnena brings the Empire-centric perspective of the historical Alexiad in collision with a dystopian reading of contemporary West Africa, forcing Anna to reflect on what it means for her to be specifically in Africa, and not in a generic exotic space. Together with the author’s previous work, The Diary of Anna Comnena forms a gelatinous ongoing treatise where seriousness is an emerging property, and the distinction between speculative fiction, design theory, and political philosophy is probably just matter of scale.