Description
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.
"Allied with the fiction of Italo Calvino, Doris Lessing, and others, THE RAVICKIANS is entertaining, thoughtful, and a quick read. As with everything published by the Dorothy, it's also a lovely little book to hold in your hand."—Jeff Vandermeer
"Gladman's talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication. A novel set inside a poem, the work grasps at the heart of an imaginary people, deftly illustrating their inner life and looming stagnation in little more than 150 pages."—Publishers Weekly
"More than a novel, THE RAVICKIANS is a kind of curated environment, one built of the culture, language, and architecture of its people, but one that recognizes as well that the reader's perspective need not be omniscient, that the reader's point of view can be directed, that the reader can be pulled into the fictive space and made to occupy the stage as an absence or an extra."—Tom de Beauchamp
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