Calamities

by Renee Gladman

Overview

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from CLMP

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696270
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	983,239
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians; Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience, which won the 2017 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; and a monograph of ink drawings, Prose Architectures. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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."
—Publishers Weekly

"She offers entry into a deliciously unsettling “narrative,” really, a sort of adventure. She reassembles art she likes and makes new art—all in service of creating a new art “experience,” suggesting a chain-letter of creation."
—Olivia Cronk, Bookslut

"Her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction—and its osmotic border with poetry—can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing."
—Eugene Lim

From the Publisher

06/13/2016
Fiction writer Gladman’s elusive and exquisite nonfiction collection investigates the potential and limitations of writing and narrative. The book comprises vignettes that are both critical and personal. In each one, Gladman (The Ravikians) constructs an intimate portrait of the writer at work. She is both playful and serious in tone, ruminating on the various romantic couplings among colleagues during a faculty meeting, looking for a “poetics of space” in Antonioni’s film Red Desert with creative writing students, or pondering loneliness in the “little white city” where she teaches. Each vignette doubles as an investigation into a literary or artistic form, from poetry to drawing. Blending the everyday with the profound, she asks, “I began the day staring into the face of the question of narrative—was anybody still interested in it, and, if so, why?” Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute. Gladman’s love affair with writing comes through when she describes “writing so as not to write, so to find the limit (that last line) beyond which the body is free to roam outside once more.” The book is a welcome addition to the tradition of experimental literature exploring the boundaries of genre, identity, and artistic expression. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly