“Folly has earned a reputation for being serious about ideas but unserious about itself—delivering provocative, boundary-pushing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art.”
magCulture UK
Folly publishes books the market can't justify but the culture deserves.
How do you bring worthy books into a world that doesn't need them?
You accept that publishing books is about creating art, we size the book to its real audience, we make it beautifully and honestly, and we tell the truth about publishing.
Folly publishes entertaining, thought provoking, intelligent and sexy writing. We back the books we take on, and market them like with the innovative thinking and fun they, and the Folly audience, deserve.
The radical act in a market that doesn't need more books is to publish them anyway, with integrity. That is what Folly Press is all about.
Our 2026 Titles
Presales
Launch date: 1 August 2026
One Year Out traces one terrible, beautiful year through addiction, public rehab, and mental unravelling — then an unexpected move to Bali where recovery collides with wellness coaches and influencers selling healing by the gram.
In a series of confessional, funny and honest essays, Charlotte Bell writes about what addiction does to a body and a conscience: the institutions, the friendships, the rejection and the small rituals of strangers keeping each other alive.
Moving between Aotearoa and Indonesia, this collection holds the messy, often absurd distance between falling apart and finding some new way to hold together.
Airini Beautrais says: “Deeply sad in places but also deeply funny, One Year Out is a refreshingly honest, insightful and self-reflexive memoir in essays. Charlotte Bell writes with unflinching clarity, aware of her own vanities and shortcomings, as well as being compassionate towards her past and present selves, and able to acknowledge what she has achieved in her recovery journey without taking anything, or anyone, for granted. There is also a genuine empathy for the people around her, from support workers and fellow addicts in recovery, to Bali travellers hoping to find themselves. Throughout all this is the voice of a writer with a keen sense of life’s mundane weirdness, and a poet’s knack for startling imagery. One Year Out is a valuable addition to the personal essay genre, but also to wider understandings about what it is like to live with mental illness and addiction.”
Illustrated by cover art licensed with thanks from New Zealand artist Sophie Greig.
When a high-street chain pulled Folly from forty-seven stores over the frankness of female desire and a stray profanity, they gave us an idea.
If the gatekeepers think women's desire is offensive, fine. We'll give it its own imprint.
Smut is the first title from Folly X — a collection of erotica that takes the part of human experience publishing is most squeamish about and puts it on good paper. Desire as it's actually lived: raw, filthy, funny, tender, and frequently un-PC. Women writing what they want. Men writing what they want, which turned out to be the most contentious material of all. Real stories, from real people, made beautifully.
Intelligent. Fun. Sexy. The same Folly, with the lights lower.
Some of it will offend you. That's allowed. We should be able to talk about human desire without anyone needing a fainting couch.
Smut is an erotic book detailing desire, power and tenderness, from the sacred to the profane — written by people from around the world. Curated alongside international black and white photography, Smut provides a classy, fun and cheeky look into modern courtship, fetish and bedroom antics.
Limited collectors edition in print.
Illustrated by art by local and international photographer. With thanks to Rudiger Beckmann for the cover image.