Out November 4, 2025

Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru.

"Brad Fox has traveled to the center of many worlds and here records a visit to the "passionate nada" in his disarming, beautifully natural style. Stranded in a powerful landscape, a clear voice renders human situations in elegant sentences that build to animate profound heartache and self-discovery. Read Another Bone-Swapping Event and witness what transforms."

Eugene Lim, author of Search History and Fog & Car

“Another Bone-Swapping Event is a trippy modern Decameron. Sequestered with an unlikely group of people from around the world, Brad Fox spent the covid pandemic in the Peruvian mountains under the care of a curandero with vast knowledge of medicinal plants. In this polyphonic book, the voices of humans and plants are woven into a dense meditation on suffering, healing, deception, truth, and what it means to be a living being on Earth.”

Marcia Bjornerud, author of Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

"Brad Fox has an uncommon talent for being able to see the light in “plight.” This book, about a journey to an unfamiliar culture of thought and medicinal practice, of plants and spiritual transparency, is potent and funny and moving, an Odyssey of our time."

Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials

"Another Bone-Swapping Event is a profound meditation on what it means to exist on a fragile and vulnerable planet while simultaneously exploring its frayed, otherworldly edges.”

Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender and Greyhound

"Another Bone-Swapping Event is a revelatory fever dream in which the world around us peels away to expose the secret patterns beneath. Visceral, unnerving, and profound, it is an astonishing achievement."

James Bradley, author of Deep Water and Ghost Species

—

In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world.

Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we’re able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.

“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.