The Broadway Machine
Forty-One Houses and the Architecture of an Art Form. On a Wednesday afternoon in midtown Manhattan, 25,000 people are sitting in the dark inside forty-one theatres owned, with near-total statistical certainty, by one of three organizations. A structural analysis of how Broadway functions as a system: ten interlocking components from the real estate cartel to the Tony Awards complex, each with its own history, its own internal logic, and its own consequences for the art that gets made and the art that does not. Why does a machine generating $1.89 billion in annual revenue find it harder than ever to sustain the conditions under which new work can survive?
View This Title
The Borrowed Saint
A Horror in Five Skins. A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent. Over fifty years, he consumes more than a hundred faces, ascending to institutional power on a performed kindness his body is allergic to, while the one man whose authentic goodness he can never replicate works unseen in the infrastructure beneath the city. A horror novel about the distance between a window and a painting of a window.
View This Title
From Genius to Joke
How We Betray the People We Should Remember. A TikTok teenager announces that Helen Keller was a fraud. A New York Times editorial mocks Robert Goddard for believing rockets could work in a vacuum. Billie Holiday dies handcuffed to a hospital bed while a federal agent guards the door. The culture that destroyed them calls it skepticism, humor, or justice. Sixteen case studies, eight paired chapters, one recurring five-stage mechanism: achievement, overpersonalization, vulnerability, reduction, cost. A prosecutorial brief against cultural ingratitude, argued from ableism to state power, from the body to the nation.
View This Title
The Failed City
An Autopsy of Urban Collapse. In late September 2013, a road crew buried 150-year-old cobblestones under fresh asphalt on Baldwin Avenue in the Jersey City Heights. Something durable was concealed beneath something disposable, for the convenience of the least permanent users of the road. That institutional habit, the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, is the subject of this book. Twenty case studies across five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework for understanding why cities die and why we refuse to study the ones that did.
View This Title
Go to Every Funeral
How Grief Defines the Living. Nobody teaches you how to grieve. A hybrid cultural investigation and memoir that asks what grief is, where it comes from, who controls it, and what happens when the structures designed to support it are broken. From the neuroscience of loss to the mourning rituals of the Torajan highlands, the burning ghats of Varanasi, and the jazz funerals of New Orleans. At its center is a single instruction, overheard in a Newark cafe twenty-five years ago, that contains an entire philosophy of human obligation: Go to every funeral.
View This Title
Abandoned in Place
A judge gave a father five days to help the mother. On the sixth day, he left. The infant woke up in a house with one fewer person in it, and no one called it what it was. Abandoned in Place traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Twelve chapters examine the grammar by which abandonment is disguised: the passive voice that removes the actor, the euphemism that renames the departure, the appeal to inevitability that converts a decision into a condition, and the therapeutic instruction that recruits the abandoned into the management of their own forgetting. The title comes from engineering: the designation for a decommissioned structure too large to remove, left standing with a notation that says no one is coming back to restore it.
View This Title
Miscast
Who Owns the Story on Stage? The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. From the all-male stages of Athens through blackface minstrelsy, from Beckett's lawsuit to August Wilson's declaration, from the casting of Hamilton to the Dramatists Guild's Inclusion Rider, fourteen chapters trace twenty-five centuries of a single question: who controls the body on stage? Written by a Guild member since 1984, an MFA from Columbia, and a playwright who cancelled his own production rather than let someone else rewrite his characters.
View This TitleSeries & Collections
Browse All →
Browse the Shelves
View All →
Fractional Fiction
View Series →A Series by David Boles
Classic literature meets contemporary research. Each novel synthesizes a public domain masterwork with modern science.
Standard Deviation
Five characters caught in a municipal scoring system. What happens when the human body is inscribed within digital circles and squares?
Civility Certified
A dossier novella. What happens when access becomes a credential? A bureaucratic horror story told through the documents themselves.
The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Prophetic somnambulism and the burden of foreknowledge. What do we owe to visions we never asked for?
The Corollary
Women's witness networks in WWI. One refusal to say amen becomes an act of international resistance.
The Held Land
Black land dispossession and inherited memory in Nebraska. Three families, 159 years, one quarter-section of prairie.
The Dying Grove
Fungal consciousness and networked memory in the Pacific Northwest.
The Inheritance
Epigenetic trauma and family secrets in Nebraska.
The Kinship of Strangers
Genetic identity and unexpected connection.
The EleMenTs Series
View Series →A Trilogy by David Boles
Disabled superheroines of earth. Power that exists because of disability, not despite it.
Beneath the City
Elle commands wind. Meen controls fire. Teena moves earth. In the tunnels beneath New York, three girls discover what they can do.
The Invisible Hand
Tal arrives with power over water. Prometheus Applied Sciences springs its trap. Four elements, four girls, one choice.
The Reckoning
The fight goes to Washington. A Senate hearing. A shadow corporation exposed. The conclusion.
The Westborough Crusaders
View Trilogy →A Trilogy by David Boles
Eight scripts. Two episodes. One trilogy. A 1982 television series becomes three novels about a high school newspaper, a dying boy, and the adults who failed all of them.
The Year Before the Wire
The summer and school year before the cameras arrive. Ares, Crew, Stan, and eight lives converging toward a sophomore year that will change everything.
A Farewell to Shins
The eight episodes. The cameras record what the hallways produce. Tiffany Brass arrives. Stan disappears into the bottle. Bergie carries the paper bag to school.
The Stopped Clock
The year after the wire goes dark. Consequence, recovery, and the question of what remains when the cameras leave.
ASL Linguistics for Practitioners
View Series →A Series by David Boles & Janna Sweenie
The rigorous linguistic and pedagogical framework that advanced signers need. Three volumes covering arm biomechanics, spatial grammar, and non-manual syntax.
Arm Angles in ASL
Where does a sign live in space, and why does placement matter? The biomechanical coordinate system of the arms and hands, formalized for instruction.
Depicting Space
Classifiers as a grammatical system, not a handshape list. How signers construct, reference, and manipulate spatial relationships through classifier morphology.
Beyond the Hands
The face and body govern grammar. Eyebrow position marks questions, gaze assigns reference, body shift drives role play. Non-manual syntax, systematized.
Best of Blogs
Annual collections from the Boles Blogs network.
Free Reading
Sample our catalog with these complimentary titles, available to read online.
View All Free Titles
One Number Connects
the Entire Boles Constellation
All roads lead to the same switchboard