Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis, Paperback, 9781643622750 | Buy online at The Nile
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Crocosmia

Author: Miranda Mellis  

Crocosmia
Paperback

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Print, radio, and online campaignSocial Media CampaignPromotion on e-newsletterInterview on Nightboat BlogSimultaneous print and e-book releaseLaunch eventEmail for more information

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Description

A revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and a radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.

A philosophical fable,Crocosmiacenters on Maya as she recollects the "great turning"-a moment of radical social and ecological change effected by her mother, Jane's, art. As Maya recalls her upbringing-from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother's disappearance-Mellis's prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.

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Critic Reviews

"A novel of revolutionary transition that achieves the impossible: not only charting the transformation of the mechanics of society, but the liberation of consciousness itself. Sentence by sentence, and in the impossible and enthralling architectures of each page, Miranda Mellis's Crocosmia is a treasure."
—Jordy Rosenberg

"Is there a way out? Mellis posits a miracle, a dream within, almost invisibled but not yet, of ecological and ethical wisdom and liberation. Crocosmia reminds us of the values we thought we had and, as its syncretic miracle blooms to show the way, could have again."
—Eugene Lim


"I read Crocosmia hungrily, in a stretch of “stolen” hours, feeling both held and fueled by its articulations of complex political desire confronting the lack—so named by Lauren Berlant—of “genres for transition.” This utter gift of a book is soaked in intelligence, beauty, resistance, and loss; its blood is what spills when theory meets practice, its references help it breathe. Meanwhile, its sentences—like its characters—grow the genre they need."

—Anna Moschovakis

"Imagine: a burning, flooding, warring planet where someone has kept their notebook open. They’ve been collecting ancient and natural recipes for revenge, written on mysterious linen woven of complex kinship, research, mythopoetics, collective action and love. If you've been fearing what follows if we survive the damage we humans have produced in our home, bury your phone in the compost for a week and read Crocosmia slowly: it will rearrange your heart and change your life."

—Cassie Thornton

"What if art could save the world? What if all we had to do was let it? Two women, mother and daughter, move to the woods to escape dark forces that plague the mother’s dreams. What follows is an incisive and beautiful meditation on imagination and intention in the Anthropocene. An apocalypse narrative infused with hope and a domestic story that shines a light on our collective power, Crocosmia functions in conversation with Jenny Offill’s Weather and Debbie Urbanski’s After World while existing in a universe all its own. This novel is a revelation."
—Sarah LaBrie

"Wildly hopeful and ecstatic with language, Crocosmia offers a yearning, visionary dose of eschatological surrealism. With both care and verve, Miranda Mellis mixes poetry, philosophy, memory, and imagination to tell a story of intergenerational debts and obligations in the face of radical social transformation. Crocosmia glows in the night."
—Roy Scranton

"Miranda Mellis has written a philosophical novel with a metaphysical sense of humor. In it, we meet Jane, who thinks about everything, and her daughter Maya, who takes her place and continues to think. Crocosmia describes a certain way of love between a mother and daughter in which, above all, it is the capacity for thought that is handed down." 
—Shahrnush Parsipur

"A novel that dares to imagine a future enlivened and entangled with art, reparation, and the vibrant presence of the more-than-human, Crocosmia is a ray of light pouring through a crack in our shattered world."
—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

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About the Author

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (2021); The Instead; The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); The Revisionist (2007). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington.

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Product Details

Publisher
Nightboat Books
Published
18th September 2025
Pages
120
ISBN
9781643622750

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