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."

Juice

Literature & Fiction

Gladman, Renee

United States

Kelsey Street Press

Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman's NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM blurs boundaries between poetry and prose. In languages of elegy and splintered consciousness, the book recreates life for the twenty-first century flø¢neur in urban America amid a confusion of aims, identities and street life of people connected to ipods downloaded with personalized mixes and sets. In a contemporary world of signs that crisscross a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel existence attuned to being lost. Quote: The / body moves away from living, from the flesh and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water. I look outward." A tension holds all frequencies together, keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the "I" of this book at the same time that it goes on without her.

Newcomer Can't Swim

Poetry

Fiction. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. 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 trilogy of novels 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.

Event Factory

Dorothy, a publishing project

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. 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. "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

MORELIA

Solid Objects

Fiction. African &amp; 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

Poetry. Fiction. A true account of a fictional work. Renee Gladman is the author of four previous books, most recently NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

To After That (Toaf)

Atelos

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

Contemporary

Krupskaya

"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
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.
I was reading a line in a book, then reading a line in another book, and performing small acts in between: I sat at intervals on the toilet, I slept sporadically, I ate kale and "fish food," and called myself "Renee" for a time. Nobody knew who I was at the grocery store, but going there was my big event. I knew the books of these people; I knew these people and I didn't change their names, but when they appeared in my books it wasn't really their stories I was telling, so they didn't need my protection and I could go "Danielle, Danielle" all day.
Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. In addition to Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), 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 Morelia is forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 fellowship from The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2016 grant to artists from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in New England with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.

Calamities

Wave Books

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