Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Divided Publishing
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
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 (2)
Bourgeois Coldnesstrans. Grace Nissan
£ 13.99
Bourgeois Coldness
Henrike Kohpeiß
trans. Grace Nissan
Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.
Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.
Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.
Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.
- 978-1-7395161-2-3
- 1 b&w illustration
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 280 pp.
- Paperback
- 30 September 2025
About the author
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.
About the translator
Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate the Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.
Press (4)
Upcoming (2)
| 12 March | Brussels | Henrike Kohpeiß at rile* books |
| 13 March | Paris | Henrike Kohpeiß at After 8 Books |