Fanny Howe (1940–2025) was the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. She taught literature and writing throughout her life and was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego. Howe mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.
Holy Smoke
£ 11.99
Available soon
£ 11.99
Available soon
Holy Smoke
Dec 2025
Holy Smoke
Fanny Howe
Last night I dreamed I had a name. It was Anon. My parents gave it to me. They sat in the back of my cab. I saw them, alive again! through the rearview mirror, soft and smiling. Where I was taking them, I do not know. Where they came from, a mystery. 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.
Revised with the author for republication for the first time since its 1979 release, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. Concentrated on a child disappeared and all that phrase carries with it, Howe captures the chaos of reality in her characteristic mix of poetry and prose. Giving genuinely fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, readers will be astounded to learn that this book was written in the last century.
- 978-1-0684395-1-3
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 104 pp.
- Paperback
- 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 (2)
Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction CollectivePacifica Radio Archives15/07/1979
Upcoming (1)
| 11 December | Brussels | Fanny Howe tribute, launch of Holy Smoke at Celador |
Another Sun: Conversations with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
£ 11.99
Available soon
£ 11.99
Available soon
Another Sun: Conversations with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castrotrans. Lara Vergnaud
Jan 2026
Another Sun: Conversations with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
Françoise Vergès Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
trans. Lara Vergnaud
Waiting at Aimé Césaire International Airport, in the city of Lamentin, Martinique, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro browses the bookshop. Alongside works by Césaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, an interview between Françoise Vergès and Césaire, and embarks.
Another Sun revisits that initial interview, blending biographical experience and concise summaries of key figures in French anti-racist thought, marking their contemporary relevance. An eclectic, attentive, mobile conversation between Rodríguez Castro and Vergès, shaped by ongoing struggles.
- 978-1-0684395-2-0
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 96 pp.
- Paperback
- January 2026
About the authors (2)
Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island) is a writer, decolonial antiracist feminist and curator. She writes on the afterlife of slavery and colonisation, psychiatry, the museum and climate disaster. Her publications include: Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024), A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024), A Decolonial Feminism (2021), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020) and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and was a project advisor for documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011). She is currently Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. She is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2018), recipient of the Anne Waldman Fellowship at Naropa University (2019) and Textual International Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2025). Her essay ‘El Nuevo Sublime’ was a finalist for the National Essay and Criticism Award in Colombia (2019). Castro is the editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984-1992 (2020), a collection of unpublished lectures by Audre Lorde, shortlisted for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism (2021), and author of The Echo (2025).
About the translator
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.