To After That (TOAF)

(Paperback)

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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. 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.

Reviews

Gladman manages to achieve an impossible balance between the intellectual rigor of an academic, the linguistic sensibility of a poet, and the probing logical fantasy of a visual artist. Trevor Ketner, Kenyon Review

Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel Im watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubiks Cube, except the goal isnt to solve it but to present every possible arrangement. Ben Purkert, The Rumpus

Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamershe writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes. Eileen Myles

Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute. Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy-Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel. Danielle Dutton is a cofounder of Dorothy, a publishing project and the author of several books, including Attempts at a Life, SPRAWL, Margaret the First, and most recently, A Picture Held Us Captive. A new collection of her prose, Prairies, Dresses, Art, Other, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.