Joana Masó is a professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development and Cultures, and works at the intersection of literature, critical thinking, contemporary art, and curating exhibitions. She has co-edited Jacques Derrida’s text on aesthetics, Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Art of the Visible (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and on architecture, Les arts de l’espace: Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture (La Différence, 2015). She has also coedited Hélène Cixous’s essays dedicated to art, Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Since 2017, she has led the research project “The Forgotten Legacy of Tosquelles” at the University of Barcelona, under the ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She has published Tosquelles. Healing Institutions (Semiotext(e) and Divided 2026, forthcoming), and Tosquelles. Avant-garde psychiatry, Radical Politics and Art (2024), the American Folk Art Museum in New York exhibition catalogue.
Divided Publishing
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
£ 20
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Tosquelles: Healing Institutionswith texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem
£ 20
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
Joana Masó
with texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem
Tosquelles had genius. This remarkable edition at last makes his thought available in English. Its importance cannot be overstated.
“Physicians, heal thyselves,” might be the best epigraph for this revolutionary and revelatory book. Grounded in the assumption that madness, not rationality, is the essence of man, Tosquelles sought to transform psychiatry from a cure for sick minds into a practice of humanization at every level, from the clinic to the community. This book is a landmark achievement.
From the bordellos-turned-annexes of the Almodóvar clinic for the Catalan militia, to a psychiatric barrack at a refugee camp that was also a means of flight, Tosquelles consistently unsettled demarcations of inside and out across the nosological, the analytic couch, the state, and the enclosed hospital—endlessly actualizing, instead, asylum-villages and therapeutic communities. Joana Masó’s careful work maps Tosquelles’s predecessors, inheritors, and legacies to come. This book presents us with existing vectors of escape and the responsibility of proliferating and mutating these at the level of the spatial, the social, and desire.
Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.
Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.
This one’s for the split subjects who bend the state to their will, for those who refuse the cure and insist on the delirium of love. For the mad and the militant and the heartbroken who are forced outside the symbolic order and far beyond the fascist dreams of Law, into an insurgent and constellatory solidarity in the rural halls of Saint-Alban and La Borde. This book is a guttural archive of where the clinic meets the commune, reminding us that no matter how we are ordered, disorder can belong to us.
This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.
Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime.
Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance.
Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings.
- 978-1-7395161-8-5
- 200 b&w illustrations
- 24 x 16.5 cm
- 400 pp.
- Paperback
- 12 March 2026
About the author
About the translators (2)
Robert Hurley has translated the work of several leading French theorists into English, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Georges Bataille and Pierre Clastres. He led the team translating selections from Foucault's three-volume Dits et écrits, 1954-88. He has also translated several works by The Invisible Committee for Semiotext(e).
Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher and literary translator. She has been recognised with a wide range of awards and nominations, including the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Award, the Prix Jan Michalski, the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award and the Lewis Galantière Award. Her novel, A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small, has been translated into two languages. She is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, in support of her translations of modern classic Pere Calders.
Holy Smoke
£ 11.99
Holy Smoke
Fanny Howe
At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.
Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.
Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.
Illustrated by Colleen McCallion
- 978-1-0684395-1-3
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 116 pp.
- Paperback
- 01 December 2025
About the author
Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and taught literature and writing throughout her life, mentoring a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, until her death on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Endorsements (3)
Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.
Poet of unsettled dreams.
Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.
Press (4)
Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction CollectivePacifica Radio Archives15/07/1979
Flood Tidetrans. Rawley Grau
£ 11.99
Flood Tide
Ana Schnabl
trans. Rawley Grau
A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.
Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.
In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.
- 978-1-7395161-5-4
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 232 pp.
- Paperback
- 27 October 2025
About the author
Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.
About the translator
Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.
Endorsements (7)
If you can imagine a story that’s an unsettling mix of psychological meltdown and detective story, featuring a stoned novelist wracked with back pain, going back to her hometown in Slovenia to masquerade as a Philip Marlowe wannabe to finally find out why her older brother died, and uncovering secrets about her friends and herself she probably would rather not have known, congratulations: you’ve just imagined Ana Schnabl’s brilliant Flood Tide. Readers, come for the moments of revelation, stay for the sight of a writer unravelling her characters until they’re left raw, and you’re left hooked.
Ana Schnabl’s new novel openly defies conventional literary genres: Are we reading a family drama, a troubled homecoming story or a marijuana-infused psychological novel? In a sleepy seaside town in contemporary Slovenia, nothing is what it seems, and no one is what they purport to be … An exciting, brilliantly written book, in which the reader shall not resist stepping into the detective’s shoes.
A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.
Schnabl’s prose is matter of fact and yet somehow thrilling. She writes with absolute clarity. Stunning.
A fizzing fox in the hen-house of cosy British crime novels. Move over Richard Osman.
A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and at once disconnecting the banal with the strangeness of grief.
We enter the story as if eavesdropping on real people – something the heroine herself confirms when she says the tale would not unfold as a psychological, sociological or crime novel, but as life itself.
Press (3)
Rippling Pages: Interviews with WritersAna Schnabl on using childhood locations and memories in stories about unpleasant people04/02/2026