Crocosmia [Paperback]

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

A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. 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.

LTMiranda Mellisis 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 She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington."[Mellis] joyfully overturns outdated assumptions about what art is and is not capable of, ultimately demonstrating that it’s capable of everything, including our salvation."
—Sarah LaBrie,BOMB

"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'sCrocosmiais a treasure."
—Jordy Rosenberg

"Is there a way out? Mellis posits a miracle, a dream withl£q