Calamities

(Hardback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer--she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes." --Eileen Myles "Gladman's talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication." --Publishers Weekly "She offers entry into a deliciously unsettling "narrative," really, a sort of adventure. She reassembles art she likes and makes new art--all in service of creating a new art "experience," suggesting a chain-letter of creation." --Olivia Cronk, Bookslut "Her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction--and its osmotic border with poetry--can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing." --Eugene Lim

Author Bio

Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. She is the author of eight works of prose, including the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), as well as a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her most recent work of fiction is Morelia, a short novel forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). A professor of creative writing at Brown University from 2006-2014 and a 2014-2015 fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she lives in Providence, RI, with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.