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.
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
£ 20
Available soon
£ 20
Available soon
Tosquelles: Healing Institutionswith texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem
Feb 2026
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
Joana Masó
with texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem
A ground-breaking document of the life and work of Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles. With many texts translated for the first time in English, Healing Institutions is a direct encounter with his clinical, intellectual and political writings, assembled by Joana Masó.
Exiled at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in Vichy France, carrying out a transformative clinical practice there until the 1960s. He worked with and against what he had, so that the hospital he helped to create was also the destitution of the structure that was there before. Saint-Alban was an extraordinary political event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth.
When someone arrived at the asylum, they were welcomed and that welcome never stopped, it was reinforced throughout their stay. This was Tosquelles’ notion of hospitality. Each patient was necessary to what was called Saint-Alban. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theatre, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of coloured pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. Given state coercion, here the issue was above all the survival of dignity for every patient.
The idea of combative asylums is not far-fetched, considering our own conditions: the generalised pathology in society at large, neoliberal governance, technical geopolitics willing to slaughter without blinking, to poison the atmosphere, to extract the minds along with the minerals, to make all of life, human and not human, quite difficult.
- 978-1-7395161-8-5
- 200 b&w illustrations
- 24 x 16.5 cm
- 400 pp.
- Paperback
- February 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.
Flood Tide
£ 11.99
Available soon
£ 11.99
Available soon
Flood Tidetrans. Rawley Grau
Oct 2025
Flood Tide
Ana Schnabl
trans. Rawley Grau
Dunja, having finally gotten a little acclaim and money from her writing career, decides it’s time to return home to the Adriatic coast and solve the mystery of her brother’s death.
It is not going well. In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the going is arduous and the people inscrutable. Her old friends—those who never left—have had years to forget or convince themselves they don’t remember.
Dunja must contend with her own ambivalences, desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her rationale for returning.
Flood Tide is a sweeping exploration of the violence born from human limitation and indecision. It is as elegantly plotted and psychologically deft as a Ross Macdonald mystery, and has the idiosyncratic virtuosity of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season.
- 978-1-7395161-5-4
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 244 pp.
- Paperback
- October 2025
About the author
Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovene writer and editor. She writes for several Slovene media outlets and is a monthly columnist for The Guardian. Her collection of short stories Untied (Razvezani, Beletrina, 2017) was met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovene Book Fair, followed by two further nominations and the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the short story collection is translated to German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020), that was well received by readers at home and abroad – 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, including the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovene Kresnik Award. Her fourth 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 Macedonian modernist poet Aco Šopov. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.
Endorsements (4)
An original novel, giving voice to life’s ambivalence and one woman’s struggle with it.
A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and 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.
In strikingly self-reflective prose, Dunja sets out to confront the traumas of her childhood, traveling to Slovenia’s coast to probe the alleged suicide of her brother. A dazzling mix of narrative styles — even genres — a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both attention and literary sensibility ... The reader is hooked.