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.