Hopeful Monsters

By: Nicholas Mosley

Published by Deep Vellum Publishing, 2025-02-18

Thirty-five years after its original publication, Hopeful Monsters reemerges as one of the "grand intellectual dramas" of the 20th century (--The New York Times).

A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student studying physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jew and political radical. Together, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth-century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test.

Originally published as the culminating volume of a series of five works of fiction entitled "Catastrophe Practice" that The Chicago Tribune called "one of the most important extended literary projects of [the 20th] century," Hopeful Monsters is the first reissue in a new Dalkey Archive initiative to bring Mosley's epistolary genius back into circulation for modern readers.