The old-time pamphlet is back.

With some of the most challenging intellectual work being done today, the old-time pamphlet is back. Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC is devoted to giving serious authors free rein to say what's right and what's wrong about their disciplines and about the world, including what's never been said before. The result is intellectuals unbound, writing unconstrained and creative texts about meaningful matters.

Recent Titles

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to... Read More »

Roy Harris

In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This was attacked by Proudhon and Nietzsche, but defended by Théophile Gautier and E. M. Forster. It influenced movements as diverse as futurism and Dada.... Read More »

About Us

Prickly Since 1993

In 1993, in Cambridge, England, the anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw started a small press called Prickly Pear. Inspired by the eighteenth-century figure of the pamphleteer, their goal was nothing less than to revitalize a stagnant academy. Together, they published a series of ten pamphlets by a range of authors—young, old, unknown, and famous—on a range of topics in anthropology, the history of science, and ethnographic film. Read More »