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

Literature & Fiction

Gladman, Renee

United States

Dorothy, a publishing project

Fiction. This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail around the room. "What about my rose beds?" demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself...then the butcher slits his throat...and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?" Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this "overlooked small masterpiece" is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Comyns, Barbara

Dramas & Plays

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. Translated from the French by Brian Evenson. "With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children and other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book."―Shelley Jackson "Humane, impossible, homely and alien, Draeger's extraordinary stories are as close to dreams as fiction can be."―China Miéville

In the Time of the Blue Ball

Draeger, Manuela

Humor & Satire

Fiction. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions. "Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling."—Robert Coover "Obsessive/delightful, FRA KEELER subtly elaborates on life's details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel's incidents pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language's bizarre disturbances. FRA KEELER is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer."—Lynne Tillman "Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Per Petterson. FRA KEELER is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how 'one lives against one's dying,' and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!"—Michelle Latiolais "In FRA KEELER a mind churns on itself, while reality—if it is reality—comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining."—Brian Evenson

Fra Keeler

Van Der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen

Fiction. A series of fragmentary tales tells the story of Lizzie, a young woman who, in her early twenties, unexpectedly embarks on a journey through psychiatric institutions, a journey that will end up lasting many years. With echoes of Sylvia Plath, and against a cultural backdrop that includes Shakespeare, Woody Allen, and Heathers, Suzanne Scanlon's first novel is both a deeply moving account of a life of crisis and a brilliantly original work of art. "Suzanne Scanlon enters the inverted space of grief and near-madness with courage, intelligence, and wit—and with a small, sharp light for us to follow."—Dawn Raffel "About ten lives occur in this very short novel. One swiftly becomes the background of the next, then that one looms up fast and for a moment you think oh this is the life. And it is ending. I like the swift consciousness with which Suzanne Scanlon orchestrates all of it and even more I admire the true (and maneuvered) intimacy that holds me here on the page despite the fact that inside and out of this volume of PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN there are so many of us, lives, and women and female writers. You wonder if we matter at all and Suzanne Scanlon says in a multitude of quietly intelligent and felt ways that we do, helplessly, all of us do, no matter."—Eileen Myles "In pitch-perfect prose, Suzanne Scanlon has given us wonderful Lizzie—smart, brave, and, at the same time, so scared stiff by her young life that that she winds up on a psych ward run by Dr. Roger, whose specialty is 'troubled, pretty girls.' PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN digs deep and speaks to us all about how we compose our individual lives in the wilds of modern times."—Elizabeth Evans "If Scanlon had employed the strategies of conventional realism, these troubling but utterly convincing stories of life in and out of psych wards would be mere bathos. Written through the liveliest sort of formal invention, they acquire real force and authority. The reader is driven before the story like something driven before a wave. And that is a deeply pleasurable feeling."—Curtis White "The voice, or voices, in Suzanne Scanlon's PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN are sly, tragic, knowing, wounded, and brave. This wholly original novel is a wonderfully refreshing addition to the many stories that tell us the news of women's grief, rebuilding, coming to terms."—Mary Gordon

Promising Young Women

Scanlon, Suzanne

Contemporary

Fiction. "Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rear view mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure."—Thurston Moore "To be among Amina Cain's creatures is to stand in the presence of what is mysterious, expansive, and alive. Whether these distinctly female characters are falling in and out of uncanny intimacies, speaking from the hidden realms of the unconscious, seeking self-knowledge, or becoming visible in all their candor and strangeness, they move through a universe shaped by the gravitational pull of elusive yet resilient forces-the yin-dark energies of instinct and feeling that animate creative life. It's here that the intuitive reach of fiction meets the reader's own quest for understanding, through the subtle beauty of living the truth of one's experiences in the most attentive and unadorned way possible."—Pamela Lu

Creature (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 8)

Cain, Amina

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. "Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn't. I don't know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I've read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. I hope he doesn't kill Nell Zink."—Keith Gessen "Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. You might not want to believe this, but her sentences and stories are so strong and convincing that you'll have no choice."—Jonathan Franzen

The Wallcreeper

Zink, Nell

Fiction. Melba Zuzzo, erstwhile innocent of the male-heavy hamlet of Dan, a town located in the foothills of ... somewhere? ... finds herself in a rut. In fact she was probably born into this rut, but today, for some reason, she feels suddenly aware of it. Everything is changing, yet nothing is making sense. The people she might rely upon, the habits she should find comforting—everything is off. It's as if life, which has gone by largely unnoticed up to now, has been silently conspiring against her the whole time. In DAN, Joanna Ruocco has created a slapstick parable that brings together the restless undercurrents and unabashed campiness of Thomas Pynchon with the meandering imaginative audacity of Raymond Roussel. Either Dan is a state of mind, beyond the reach of any physical map, or else it sits on every map unnoticed, tucked beneath the big red dot that tells us YOU ARE HERE. "Ruocco spins unusual shapes out of language, but not because her interests are narrowly linguistic. By reshaping language, she redefines the world it conjures forth. Her fiction so often flirts with the fantastic perhaps because she understands that when language stops operating according to its ordinary rules, it creates an alternate reality, swerving away from what normally counts as 'real.'?"—The Nation "Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses."—Triquarterly "Joanna Ruocco's DAN is a tiny novel that packs a massive punch."—Bustle "Ruocco has given serious thought to how much she can do with language while still preserving a story's integrity... Modernist-style experimentation ain't dead yet. Giddy, intriguing stuff from a writer eager to let words misbehave."—Kirkus "Ruocco's work is cutting-edge, pushing the established tropes within contemporary fiction, calling her readers to interpret and examine the nuances of seemingly everyday life."—Publishers Weekly "This outrageously hilarious book is also a warning against how others will happily use our hope, our empathy, and our imaginations against us... even while they are eating our hot pretzels."—Drunken Boat "This novel is funny and smart but knows how to balance both deftly enough to create a genuine world out of the completely obtuse."—ASKMEN

Humor & Entertainment

Ruocco, Joanna

Humor

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