Machines in the Head: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Kavan, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1681374145 ISBN 13: 9781681374147

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2020

Synopsis

Enter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her best short stories.

Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This anthology of Kavan's stories draws together a selection of her best writing from across her long career. Stories from across her collections show the range of her style: oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and asylum incarceration from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka. Her late sci-fi stories will appeal to fans of her last novel, Ice. "Five Days to Countdown," first published in Encounter (1968) and later collected in My Soul in China, is preoccupied with Cold War concerns and the sartorial aesthetics of the 1960s, and, published here for the first time, "Starting a Career" is a futuristic spy thriller, whose protagonist sets out to become the world's greatest enigma.

Kavan was determined to experiment throughout her writing career, and this collection is moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, but always distinctive and often unique. And even though better known as a writer than an artist, Kavan painted throughout her life; several of her distinctive paintings are included in this collection to illustrate her stories.

About this title

About the Author:

Anna Kavan (1901-1968), born Helen Emily Woods, was a British writer and painter. She attended the London Central School of Arts and Crafts during the 1920s, which was also the period in which her heroin use, which continued intermittently until her death, began. In 1940, she began publishing under "Anna Kavan," the name of one of her fictional characters. During this period her writing became darker and more experimental, and her first collection of stories Asylum Piece was well received. She went on to work as a secretary at the literary journal Horizon, where she also contributed stories, articles, and reviews. She became reclusive, struggling with poor health and difficulty in publishing, until 1967, when her best-known novel Ice was published. Kavan died of heart failure the following year.

Victoria Walker is the Chair of the Anna Kavan Society. She teaches in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London.

Review:

"Few novelists match the fierce intensity of her vision." —J.G. Ballard, The Paris Review

"Entering this haunting realm, the reader will crave to plunge deeper into her metallic and poetically surreal universe." —Patti Smith

"It is the cool lucid light of that unique mind which makes her Anna Kavan ... There is nothing else like her writing ... She is one of the most distinctive twentieth-century novelists." —Doris Lessing

"Kavan’s talent for extracting an austere beauty from intimations of doom is as compelling here as in so much of her greatly admired work." —Rhys Davies

"If you love J.G. Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan." —Chris Power, The Guardian

"Kavan wrote some of the twentieth century’s most haunting and original fiction ... To those cultish fans who see Kavan’s marginality as central to her glamour, mainstream acceptance may be unwelcome. But for this most imaginative and otherworldly of writers, whose plots seamlessly merge fantasy and reality, past and future, life and death, nothing could be more apt than a cross-century literary resurrection." —Emma Garman, The Paris Review

"A writer of hypnotic power and imagination." —The Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1681374145
• ISBN 13: 9781681374147
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Walker Victoria