Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.

‘I read everything Kapil writes and each time am left in awe at her erudite dexterity to see the book, not as a medium of mere knowing, but of questing. Here she casts the dialectical inquiry between continuity and rupture, deploying cyborgs and monsters to overlay and amplify existential questions for the Anthropocene. The result is an ambitious work of complex yet coherent semiotic prowess I can’t wait to teach from.’  Ocean Vuong

‘A feminist, post-colonial On the Road.’ Douglas A. Martin

‘Incubation: A Space for Monsters is a transnational love song, an avowal for immigrants, monsters, and girls everywhere.’ Emgee Dufresne

‘Kapil constructs a loose tool for cyborg/monster travelers: for those who have assimilated and are suffering because of their insides, and for those who cannot adapt or refuse to and thus, do not survive. She reminds us that one’s becoming is not and never our own, but rather, tortuously prescripted.’ Eunsong Kim

‘Part autofiction, part cyborgian existentialism, each sentence cuts through the coloniser’s cheek, revealing its rotten tongue’s hallucination of ‘others’ as ‘monsters’. Can we reclaim our monster-hood? Is that possible for those of us who have to daily stomach ‘great replacement’ theories and other such tutti and pishaav? We may not find answers, but we will find a red vengeance at the precise moment where a snarl and a laugh become indistinguishable. […] What a gift this book is! And after all this time, on its own odyssey: it still reads with such fresh air.’ Azad Ashim Sharma