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WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from CLMP A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.
“More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman’s achievement ranks alongside many of Borges’ in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact.” —Jeff VanderMeer Since 2010 writer and artist Renee Gladman has placed fantastic and philosophical stories in the invented city-state of Ravicka, a Ruritanian everyplace with its own gestural language, poetic architecture, and inexplicable physics. As Ravicka has grown, so has Gladman's project, spilling out from her fiction—Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge—into her nonfiction (Calamities) and even visual art (Prose Architectures). The result is a project unlike any other in American letters...
"A book of pen-and-ink drawings by artist, poet, and fiction writer, Renee Gladman"--
Fiction. African American Studies. Straddling fiction and poetry, Renee Gladman's writing operates on the level of the sentence, constructing suprise and oblique meanings at every turn, and somehow managing the supremely difficult trick of both engaging and pushing the reader. "THE ACTIVIST begins in the middle of a revolution....There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the mids of all this, the language of news reports mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize"--Juliana Spahr.
"A book of drawings and text by Renee Gladman"--
“More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman’s achievement ranks alongside many of Borges’ in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact.” —Jeff VanderMeer A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening. Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.
The second volume of Gladman's acclaimed Ravicka trilogy continues the author's profound and fantastical meditation on translation, architecture, and the ephemeral. The Ravickians narrates the day-long odyssey of Luswage Amini, the Great Ravickian Novelist, who journeys through the city to attend the reading of an old friend. Where the earlier volume, Event Factory, explores Ravicka from the outside, via a visitor's attempt to understand and interpret that city's irreducible strangeness, The Ravickians faces the problem of translation from the perspective of an insider who struggles, throughout her account, to make plain the political and personal crises of Ravickian life that she knows to be untranslatable.
A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time. Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel. TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.
“In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, it’s the sentence that is alive and that is also a kind of architecture or landscape.” —Amina Cain “Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman's magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative space...
A sumptuous artist's book of acclaimed writer Renee Gladman's fantastical drawings that merge writing and architecture, with a response from Fred Moten Since 2013, poet, novelist, essayist and artist Renee Gladman (born 1971)--author of the acclaimed Ravickians novels--has been doing a kind of asemic writing that is also at once drawing and architecture (some of this work was published as Prose Architectures in 2017). Printed in white ink on black, with a beautiful embroidered cover, One Long Black Sentence brings together these drawings with a text by New York-based theorist and poet Fred Moten (born 1962) to form a sumptuous artist's book in which drawing becomes an architecture for thought, for what writing looks like from the inside out. Fred Moten's "Anindex" pushes the index beyond its utilitarian conventions. At times riffing on the architectonics of Gladman's illustrations, Moten's associative poetic prose points toward the structuring imposition or emergence of sentences as the marks and forms of thought.