United States
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11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000 feet into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures flit out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence. He is the first person to witness this alien world.
Beebe's dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, scientific expectations disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; outlandish organisms thrive where no one expected them.
The Bathysphere Book blends research, storytelling, and poetic experiments, traveling through entangled histories of scientific discovery into the bottomless magic of the deep unknown.
Brad Fox is a writer, journalist, translator and former relief contractor living in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily and Guernica, among other publications. His novel To Remain Nameless was a finalist for the Big Other Fiction award and a staff pick at the Paris Review. Fox is a certified scuba diver and has been cave diving in central Budapest, wreck diving in Bermuda, and dived a decommissioned oil platform off the coast of Peru.
"An alternative history of Beebe's exploration of the deep ocean, a weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown"
– Guardian
"Holds up a mirror to a pioneering explorer of the deep seas [...] Fox unspools a quirky, digressive series of meditations on Beebe, his times and ours"
– Financial Times
"Wondrous [...] Beebe's descent becomes a Blakean heaven or hell, as the giant eyeball of the bathysphere hangs in the abyss [...] As Fox dives into Beebe's biography, the book itself becomes the bathysphere"
– Philip Hoare, Spectator
"Hypnotic [...] Beautifully written [...] raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity, and lets readers find answers on their own"
– The New York Times
"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, author of The City & the City and Perdido Street Station
"A delightfully eccentric melange of nature writing, popular science and poetic storytelling, Fox's tour de force is a love letter to the magic of the ocean, the vision of maverick scientists and a period of historic discovery"
– Waterstones
"This is no straightforward narrative but a book built from scraps that belie its intricate engineering. It is also an exceptionally beautiful object"
– Washington Post, Books of the Year
"A breathtaking book, full of suspense, revelation, and beauty. Masterful!"
– Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus
"A work of vaulting ambition, wonder, and peerless technique, with startling ideas and insights on every page, The Bathysphere Book is an exhilarating read and one of the best things I've read in years. Its reckoning with ecology – its refusal to ignore the legions of animal life humanity is tangled up in – is shiveringly exciting, important, and new."
– Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension and Infinite Ground
"In Brad Fox's retelling the life work of an explorer-scientist becomes a thing of rich poetry, strange imaginings and otherworldly beauty. A wondrous, mesmerising collage of a book, one that celebrates the natural world while pushing up against the tantalising limits of human knowledge and perception"
– Helen Gordon, author of Notes from Deep Time
"Exquisite and shocking, endless space and hypnotic details all pressed together at once, just as any exploration of the deep should be. Brad Fox shows there is so much in the deep ocean to know and think about and change who we are"
– Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss
"Brad Fox has produced an impressionistic work of art depicting one of the greatest moments of discovery in human history. Fashioned from short, nimble verbal strokes, this gem of a book provides tantalizing glimpses of deep-sea life, alongside flashes of insight into the lives of William Beebe and his team of explorers."
– Edith Widder, author of Below the Edge of Darkness
"Brad Fox blends excursions into science, history, colour theory, sea exploration and language to weave together a genre-defying book about oceans that is imbued with intelligence, curiosity and wonder."
– Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
"Brad Fox has created a brilliant work of literary art – at once almanac and seance, wonder-cabinet and hallucinogen. The vigor, pluck, and compression of his language turn a linear chronicle into a time-bending, gem-laden constellation, with surprising flashes of wit, gossip, and melodrama"
– Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Ultramarine and The Cheerful Scapegoat
"Original and often profound, this 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 Reviews
"Brad Fox illuminates the extraordinary discoveries of the ocean depths, to be sure, but also of the scientists and artists who first explored them, less than a century ago. To read this glorious and beautifully illustrated account [...] is to feel again a child's awed delight at human ingenuity, and at our planet"
– Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children and A Dream Life
"What is this sublime, remarkable book? It's a black unreadable eye sliding past a submarine window, it's a color on an alien spectrum, it's a fish made of filaments and lit by its own light. I don't know what it is, I only know that it's luminous"
– Shelley Jackson, author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and Riddance
