Description
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.
"There are passages in EVENT FACTORY which are furiously beautiful. The evening air is 'tender'; the light is 'yellow'; the morning is a 'greener yellow at the start of the day but every moment growing golden.' Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. And while it's probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman's project, it must be said that EVENT FACTORY, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. It makes great, unpredictable company."—Adam Novy
"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. In EVENT FACTORY the details of her dream gleam specifically yet they bob on the surface of a deeper wider abyss we all might be becoming engulfed in. It has the strange glamour of Kafka's Amerika, this book, but the narrator, lusty and persuasive, is growing up."—Eileen Myles
"In Renee Gladman's extraordinary EVENT FACTORY, the world in all its languaged variousness adumbrates a 'yellow-becoming' map for our deepest internal spelunkings, a map we don't dare do without as we negotiate, along with our intrepid narrator, the world of Ravicka, the sprawling city, where, we might say, to borrow from Gladman, 'nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything is 'said' to happen . . .' and where we might also say, to borrow from Beckett, the magnifying and minifying mirrors have been shattered and the body has, yes, 'vanished in the havoc of its images.'"—Laird Hunt
Author Bio
Renee Gladman is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including her series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka: EVENT FACTORY (2010), THE RAVICKIANS (2011), ANA PATOVA CROSSES A BRIDGE (2013), and HOUSES OF RAVICKA (2017), all available from Dorothy, a publishing project. CALAMITIES (Wave Books, 2016) is a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. PROSE ARCHITECTURES (Wave Books, 2017) is her first monograph of drawings. MORELIA (Solid Objects, 2019), a novel, is her latest. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.
Author City: PROVIDENCE, RI USA