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      The Hundreds is a poetic experiment in sensing and writing a new ordinary. This ordinary is not just what you can take for granted, but the zone of ongoingness you wake up into and move through, where forms of life, including concepts, appear through encounters with the force of the world. It includes ongoing practices and intuitions in their usual spaces and gestures, plus whatever induces the uptake of interest. Stewart, an ethnographer, and Berlant, a writer, wanted to develop a way to get at the core of scenes, episodes, and exchanges. They made up ways of following things and amplifying their resonance into written environments. “Writing out” promotes a slower feeling out. What is a concept if it’s no longer seen as a truth-effect? What is theory once it’s seen as a training in absorption, speculation and framing? What is an encounter once it’s seen as an incitement to composition? What can be done with the love, judgment, structural violence and stranger intimacy appearing at the incidental scale? 

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      The book contains a hundred “hundreds.” Each of them is a hundred words or a multiple of a hundred words long. Each piece tries to get at something, to capture or move with a situation. Story problems, incidents, glances, tone shifts, hooks pulling the writing somewhere or swerving to one side of a thing that's happening: history extending from anywhere but not summing up the world. The discipline of the hundred words is expansive and severe. People matter as well as pets, objects in the house, signs, smells and