“Hypnotic . . . Beautifully written and beautifully made.”
—W. M. Akers, The New York Times Book Review

“A weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown.” —Edward Posnett, The Guardian

“Mesmerizing . . . Original and often profound, [The Bathysphere Book] is a moving testament to the wonders of exploration.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Imbued with the adventurous spirit of science and exploration . . . [The Bathysphere Book is] an enchanting cabinet of curiosities.” —Kirkus

A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives.

In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.

The Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty full-color images, records from the original bathysphere logbooks, and the moving story of surreptitious romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line between poetry and research, unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.

“Brad Fox knows that the descent into the deep meant a sea-change not just in science, but in aesthetics, philosophy, the sense of what it is to be human. All have been changed, become rich and strange, as this rich, strange book shows so beautifully.”
CHINA MIÉVILLE

Read excerpts in Smithsonian Magazine, Orion, Hakai, and Lit Hub and reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, The Financial Times, New Scientist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly.

Read interviews about the book in Bomb, Hypertext, and Inside Hook and blog posts at Waterstones and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Listen to podcast episodes about the book on Across the Pond and Constant Wonder.

To Remain Nameless flashes between a birth scene in a New York City hospital and the story of a decades-long friendship between two international relief workers, one of whom is in labor. From the cramped, germinating vantage of a hospital room, the novel unfurls a teeming network of international exaltations and disappointments. From the Balkans, to Egypt, to Istanbul amid the ongoing refugee crisis—an era that includes the US’s war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and many forms of global consequence and aftermath—the room compresses; the world expands.

“Daring, vivid and utterly original, Brad Fox’s debut is a tour de force.”
CLAIRE MESSUD

“To Remain Nameless is a gorgeous meditation on a shifting self in a shifting world, a querying-onward in which there’s both melancholy and delight.”
SHELLEY JACKSON

“Brad Fox’s virtuoso novelistic voice, alternately terse and florid, in the mode of José Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, or Alberto Moravia, is sonorous, lapidary, and melancholy—a seamless dreamy fabulist omniscience, bearing world-weary witness to perilous events, both inner and outer. Fox gives the impression of having lived underground or in other centuries and of only now emerging from his hiding place to narrate these limpid yet dense fantasias. A phenomenally gifted novelist and a probing intellectual, he transforms critical thinking into dramatic scenario. “Thought” isn’t appended to the story, but emerges in the complicated telling of the tale.”
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

“Very intense like a bright light.”
FANNY HOWE

PRESS

This Thing Feels Alive — interview with Il’ja Rakoš for The Millions.

A review by Dan Visel at With Hidden Noise.

Praise the Mutilated World — Clare Needham at Apofenie.

A Year in Reading — Il’ja Rakoš’s best of 2020 list at The Millions.

A review by Ron Slate at On the Seawall.

Jane Breakell’s staff-pick capsule for The Paris Review.

An interview with Ellen Boyette at Full Stop.