Some stories were never lost. They were just waiting in the wrong language, on the wrong shelf, in a world that kept telling certain readers they had outgrown the dark.

Caipora Books is an independent international publisher dedicated to Gothic fiction, folklore, and the dark imagination. We publish atmospheric, handcrafted books for the women who never stopped needing strange stories — and for the weird, wonderful children they are raising.

We are also home to Caipora Kids, with two imprints for young readers: Witchlings, for younger children stepping into their first dark fairy tales, and Youth of the Night, for teens who are ready to go deeper into the forest. Together they form one world — because Morticia and her Wednesday have always belonged in the same house.

Our collections live under Halls in the Forest — Gothic fiction, dark folk tales, folklore-inspired stories, and forgotten literary voices from Brazil, Europe, and beyond. We believe in soft Gothic, not sanitized. We believe children can handle complexity. We believe the women who love dark things are not a niche — they are a diaspora, scattered and looking for home.

Who is Caipora?

Representation and diversity take many forms.
We chose folklore and dark narratives.

Caipora is a creature belonging to Indigenous Mythology who protects the jungle and its animals.

Caipora is a creature from Indigenous Brazilian mythology — a fierce, mysterious protector of the jungle and its animals. Known also as Curupira and Kaipora, this ancestral figure belongs to the indigenous peoples of Brazil, and we carry that name with the respect and reverence it deserves.

To us, Caipora is also a symbol. A face of mixture and integration. A reminder that the most powerful stories come from the places the world forgot to look. Outside Brazil, almost nobody knows her name. We decided to change that.

Expect depth and poetry. Expect the uncanny. Expect stories that were always yours — you just hadn't found them yet.

Welcome to the forest.

We love paper, but we love the forest more.

The face of this house is a being that protects the forests. We could never make use of the bodies of trees without giving something back. Nature is cyclical: all take, all must give back. Scattered and isolated as we have become in this fast-changing world, books are a form of resistance — since we no longer have as many tribes as we need to carry knowledge forward. The world has gone digital, and that too has its impact on the environment. We keep paper alive, but not by cannibalising.

Caipora Books (Editora Caipora) supports SOS Amazônia monthly. The least we can do. The more we grow, the more we want to give — to help clean the lungs of the world.

This is an invitation for you to do the same, if you can.

Donate to SOS Amazônia → Donate to SOS Pantanal → Donate to One Tree Planted →

Manifesto

There is a creature in the forest who has been waiting for you. She is not the wolf. She is not the danger. She is the one who knew you were coming before you did.

We believe you have been living too fast and too dry. We believe something in you is still feverish — still capable of longing, still touched by mist and candlelight and the particular ache of a story that refuses to end cleanly. We believe that ache is not weakness. It is the most honest thing about you.

We believe in the sacred and the sublime. In curiosity as a form of courage. In the dark not as absence but as density — the place where meaning accumulates when the noise finally stops.

We believe that the great mother is not soft. She is the forest. She contains everything: the medicinal and the poisonous, the known path and the one that has never been walked. She holds both, because both are real, and she does not lie to you about which is which.

We are the fever between sleep and waking. We are the long kiss in the humid dark. We are the thing you almost remembered, then did.

We publish the stories that carry the fever. Gothic fiction that does not sanitize. Folklore that remembers what it was before it was made safe. Fairy tales with their teeth. Voices from the Tropical Gothic brought into English for the first time, treated as the masterworks they are.

At Caipora, the witches still love in the woods. The ghosts still wear gowns.

Caipora Books. Berlin & Rio de Janeiro. For the weird kids. For the women who love their families and still need the dark.