Renee Gladman

Thinking collapses and remerges in this metafictional collection of essays following a writer and artist at work.

Calamities

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.

Event Factory

Fiction. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. The second volume of Gladman's Ravicka trilogy continues the author's profound meditation upon translation 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.

The Ravickians

Fiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Ravicka's comptroller, author of "Regulating the Book of Regulations," seems to have lost a house. It is not where it's supposed to be, though an invisible house on the far side of town, which corresponds to the missing house, remains appropriately invisible. Inside the invisible house, a nameless Ravickian considers how she came to the life she is living, and investigates the deep history of Ravicka--that mysterious city-country born of Renee Gladman's philosophical, funny, audacious, extraordinary imagination.

Houses of Ravicka

To after That (Toaf)

Fiction. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. "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 spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours."—Lyn Hejinian

Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

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.

The Activist

Juice

"A book of drawings and text by Renee Gladman"--

Plans for Sentences

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman’s ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. My Lesbian Novel is a novel inside an interview inside an invisible book. It is at once an homage to, an offering in, and a critique of the genre of the lesbian romance, but it is also a meditation on novel writing: how novels accommodate themselves to living, and how our living—cooking, thinking, walking in the forest, drawing—shapes the ways we read and write.

My Lesbian Novel

“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.

Poetry. African American studies. Postulating a new age of iron with these highly wrought lines, Renee Gladman questions how we experience our life and times, what is real and what is fantasy. She combines elements of narrative with an attention towords and letters that reminds us how much her usual practice of fiction is informed by her sense of poetry. Like wrought iron itself these graceful, unpredictable patterns stand out against the stark day. "the vivid/ black /unseeing" Here a landscape is created and taken apart.

A Picture-feeling

Poetry. African American Studies. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that has drawn praise and attention from her contemporaries. JUICE describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."

“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 today, a fictional world that spans not only multiple books but different genres, even different art forms. In Houses of Ravicka, the city's comptroller, author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, seems to have lost a house. It is not where it's supposed to be, though an invisible house on the far side of town, which corresponds to the missing house, remains appropriately invisible. Inside the invisible house, a nameless Ravickian considers how she came to the life she is living, and investigates the deep history of Ravicka—that mysterious city-country born of Renee Gladman's philosophical, funny, audacious, extraordinary imagination.

Poetry. Fiction. Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies. In NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, Renee Gladman invites us to accompany her protagonists on their treks into, through and across variegated, mysterious soulspaces and dreamscapes, troubling the surfaces and boundaries of story and genre. Her figures touch down, chapter by chapter, onto beaches, city streets, and unmarked territories, in which echoes, shadows, and parallel presences delineate borders of the cannily strange. As the narrative flickers before us, gathering into an enthralling flow, we find ourselves recording with unmeasured exhilaration that Gladman once again is mapping one of the most original and vital courses in contemporary literature.

Newcomer Can't Swim

Since the early 1990s, Renee Gladman has been collecting problems in writing; beginning with the problem of the person, she has, in the duration, gone on to explore those of time, place, and translation. These problems have occurred as events of the city, in the language of identity and confusion.

To After that (Toaf)

Fiction. "How does Renee Gladman manage to make language different from itself? How does she make space different from itself too? In this short novel there is an expansive mystery, but I don't think it exists to be solved. There is 'Bze,' but there is also fried fish. There is a city with structures in it that multiply or are 'half-articulated,' where climate dictates how the city's inhabitants move. MORELIA is exquisite. And Gladman is, easily, one of the most intriguing and important writers of our time."--Amina Cain "I read this book as a gift to fiction writers. It maps my reality as a person whose daily experience is made simultaneously by the immediately sensory, the aftermath of dream, and the constant sense of narrative at work. MORELIA is an immaculately constructed, entirely fictive landscape, a story of the adventure of detection in its every aspect. No one writes prose like Renee Gladman."--Lucy Corin "Strange and brilliant, a mystery, an adventure, a mad escape: this story is all Gladman, shimmers with Gladman, sings. Every page is a song."--Deb Olin Unferth

Renee Gladman

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