Nicholas Muellner — Love in a Time of Allegory

Join us for a book launch and lecture from Nicholas Muellner, on occasion of the release of Love in a Time of Allegory, newly published by SPBH Editions.

Love in a Time of Allegory asks how we can still feel, desire, and imagine in an age of relentless realism. Moving between images and text, Nicholas Muellner’s illustrated essay turns to allegory as a way of thinking through politics, love, and meaning when private life is inseparable from public crisis.

Haunted by political and ecological anxiety and by the erosion of shared truths, Muellner argues that realism jeopardizes our capacity to imagine the world as anything other than it already is, asking how fiction and metaphor might open other ways of seeing. The book unfolds as a meditation on desire and belief, on how intimacy persists within disillusionment, and how emotion becomes a form of resistance.

Drawing on histories of art, literature, and philosophy, Muellner proposes that allegory, like love, keeps open the possibility of connection in a fractured world. Love and allegory resist the flattening of experience, insisting that imagination remains a radical, collaborative act capable of transforming even the most precarious realities into tenderness and hope.

SPBH Essays The SPBH Essays series aims to inject provocative new ideas into the contemporary cultural debate. The visual and textual essays oscillate between the academic and the lyrical, the poetic and the political. To reflect - and reflect upon - our fast-changing world, writers, academics, and artists offer their ideas on how to use and to think about art and culture today.

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