Is Anna a war writer ?
WW|WW 1|WW 2|war writer|war cold
description
-
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
book, 1986This is an updated and greatly expanded version of Aldiss's highly respected Billion Year Spree (1973). The first ten chapters remain the same, with six new chapters added. Aldiss considers Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first modern science fiction story and contends that all current science fiction has inherited its literary form from that novel and its Gothic offshoots.
-
The case of Anna Kavan: a biography
book, 1992 -
Ice and Guilty by Anna Kavan
webpage, 24/09/2007About a year ago, I attended the guest of honor talk at ICon, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy convention. The speaker was Neil Gaiman, and his topic was dreams. With typical low-key irreverence, Mr. Gaiman sidestepped his assigned subject. Nothing, he claimed, is quite so boring as actual dreams, in which the mind's processing centers, cut off from the senses and from higher reasoning, continue to churn and light up, producing certainties and causal leaps ("and suddenly it wasn't my high school gym teacher; it was my mother" is my best recollection of Mr. Gaiman's way of describing this effect) that have no relation to logic, narrative, or even metaphor and symbolism. Anna Kavan's Ice unfolds with a similar dream-like logic.
-
What's the Story: Reading Anna Kavan's Ice
journalArticle,Anna Kavan's Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s.
-
I love this photo of AK, The sleepwalker in the city...
blogPost, 16/06/2009Anna Kavan returned to war time Britain and spent the rest of her troubled life there. She continued to publish books. I remember seeing a book by her in the 1970s and thinking she was Eastern European. She's that strain of English writing which is Eurocentric, 'surrealiste' is the term she used. I have now finished the book and it's lodged in my mind as something rare and wonderful - the sound of a voice.
-
Neige, d’Anna Kavan
blogPost, 20/11/2013La britannique Anna Kavan fait partie des écrivains qui se sont forgé un personnage, un masque, une façade qui est devenue partie intégrante de leur œuvre – ce n’est pas pour rien si en 1939 elle fait rayer de l’État civil son nom de baptême pour adopter l’identité de l’un de ses personnages.
-
Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me
blogPost, 06/08/2007Anna Kavan was the pen-name of Helen Woods (1901-68), a British writer and artist (her self-portrait can be seen here). By all accounts she was a deeply damaged individual: prone to mental illness and a lifelong heroin addict, she attempted suicide several times in the course of her life.
-
Kafka's sister
magazineArticle, 31/07/2010Fuelled by heroin and self-exploration, Anna Kavan's underground Kafka-esque novels penetrated the human psyche in a manner that distrubed even JG Ballard.
-
Anna Kavan
blogPost, 31/05/2007I can only apologize for being so distracted by bath plugs the last time I mentioned Anna Kavan.It can't have been helpful so now I plan to dedicate myself to the cause of Anna and ensure you all know about her without any deviation,hesitation or repetition whatsoever
-
Review: Ice, Anna Kavan
blogPost, 28/06/2011When I picked up this book, all I knew about it was that it was apocalyptic. I certainly didn’t realise that the apocalyptic scenario in fact plays out a sinister psychological dreamscape, where the boundaries between interior and exterior, real and imagined, hallucination and daydream, sadistic wish-fulfillment and physical injury, are utterly erased. That was a shock. But whilst Kavan’s Ice turned out to be far more disconcerting than I’d anticipated, it certainly wasn’t disappointing.
-
Anna Kavan – a unique modernist vision
blogPost, 2013It’s not quite correct to say that Anna Kavan has been forgotten. Her books are kept in print out of sheer dedication by her publisher, Peter Owen. My colleague at the University of East Anglia, Karen Schaller, teaches her novel Ice on her course Fiction After Modernism. And a recent paean to this same novel appeared in the Guardian.
-
Introducing Anna Kavan
magazineArticle, 24/02/2011There’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied. And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan.
-
Anna Kavan
journalArticle,It has been said that Anna Kavan wrote in a mirror. The body of work left by the now obscure British modernist represented a constant inquiry into her own identity, and the invention of a personal mythology—or demonology, as it would become later in her career.
-
I Am Lazarus: Stories by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 07/01/2015Unlike Julia and the Bazooka, this collection of Kavan’s short fiction was originally published during her lifetime, and the significance of this distinction is clear. This book is more balanced, with most if not all of the stories written during a period of Kavan’s life in wartime London following her return from living abroad. While there are a few that stray beyond the more obvious parallels to Kavan’s experience, such as the gothic tale ‘The Brother’ and the horror snapshot ‘The Gannets’, most stories here reflect that distinct time in her life.
-
Anna Kavan's New Zealand: a Pacific interlude in a turbulent life
book, 2009New Zealanders live 'in temporary shacks, uneasily, as reluctant campers too far from home', wrote Anna Kavan in a London magazine in 1943. Her seemingly negative comments created a stir both in the UK and New Zealand and suggested Kavan felt nothing but antipathy for the country. However, in researching this prize-winning author of nineteen books, Dr Jennifer Sturm uncovered letters and unpublished short stories written during Kavan's sojourn in New Zealand that show a more complex, affectionate and significant response. Those stories are published here for the first time, along with a fascinating discussion of this experimental writer and talented artist, who struggled with bouts of depression and insecurity, as well as heroin addiction and a stream of unconventional love affairs. Kavan roamed the world trying to find a home, and although her stay in New Zealand was for less than two years, her stories reveal a country where she found temporary peace, a country she captures in a warm and astute gaze. This book provides an intriguing insight, not only into the life and writing of Anna Kavan but also New Zealand of the 1940s.
-
In the Frame for May
blogPost, 08/05/2012Having recently seen a body of contemporary artwork work by Heather and Ivan Morrison inspired by the life and work of the novelist Anna Kavan (1901-1968), on display at The Hepworth Wakefield until 10 June, the Archivist has written the following about Kavan’s portrait of Luz, the ‘elusive protagonist’ of her novels Ice and Mercury:
-
Anna Kavan : brilliant like ice
blogPost, 29/09/2011Her descriptions burned so brightly when I first began reading the work of Anna Kavan that I felt a kinship with her almost at once. I have sometimes wandered past her last home in Peel Street, London, in pilgrimage. The novels and memoirs stand on my shelves: I came across Ice first, then Asylum Piece and My Madness, then Let me Alone, Julia and the Bazooka with its 1960s hip bohemianism, and Sleep Has His House.
-
Outside the asylum of her mind
newspaperArticle, 25/06/2006Since we often hear complaints about the puerile state of current publishing, it is as well to remind oneself that exceptional work has often had a hard time of it in Britain. Henry James struggled to sell his greatest novels. James Joyce was published in Paris. Ronald Firbank paid for his own publication. D H Lawrence was reviled. But because literature is about extending reality, not repeating it, there is some law of creativity which guarantees that the exceptional is what survives. So perhaps it is no wonder that the esoteric and beautiful writing of Anna Kavan refuses to go away - but it has been a near thing.
-
Anna Kavan © Orlando Project
webpage, 2006-2014Women's Writing in the British isles from the Beginnings to the Present
-
Anna Kavan, la ciencia ficcion extrana y alucinada : Hielo
blogPost, 28/10/2008Conocí Hielo, de Anna Kavan, porque soy aficionada a la ciencia ficción y estaba preparando una Bibliografía de escritoras del género. Alguien me recomendó la novela, como uno de esos ejemplos en que una autora no especializada en CF hace una incursión en esa literatura que -tanto respecto a los autores como al público aficionado- tiene mucho de ghetto.
-
A Stranger on Earth by Jeremy Reed
newspaperArticle, 07/07/2006On the cover is an old snap of Anna Kavan tinted to make her look like somebody she never could have been. Before colour photography, it was a profession: tinting photographs, flattering the sitter. If it was the novelist herself who agreed to this enhanced Anna, then the picture is probably a witness to another of her attempts to be just like everybody else, and that is painful.
-
A 20th century author I had never read before…
blogPost, 17/06/2008This brings me to a writer of the World War II and mid twentieth century periods, Anna Kavan. There is also a web-site about her work. Guilty (2007) was in fact written much earlier.
-
Kavan’s place in NZ literary history (by Lawrence Jones)
blogPost, 31/05/2009NNA KAVAN is probably known in New Zealand, if at all, primarily for her rather unflattering portrait of the country in “New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry,” published in 1943 in Horizon. This book, the fruit of eight years of research by Jennifer Sturm, has attempted to change that situation, to bring about the recognition of “Kavan’s role in the literary history of New Zealand.”
-
Anna Kavan - De Quincey's heir, Kafka's sister
blogPost, 07/12/2009Anna Kavan (April 10, 1901—1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter.
-
Guilty by Anna Kavan
webpage, 20/04/2007Rhys Davies, one of Anna Kavan’s few close friends, wrote an introduction for Julia and the Bazooka (1970), a posthumous collection of her stories linked by their common allusion to her heroin habit.
-
My Last Heather and Ivan Morison Puppet Show
blogPost, 06/06/2012As part of their exhibition, Anna, at The Hepworth Wakefield, Heather and Ivan Morison asked a number of Visitor Services Assistants to enact their (the artists’) interpretation of the novel Ice by Anna Kavan (following strict instructions) using specially created puppets. The show was 22 minutes long and took place every Saturday and Wednesday at 3.00.
-
Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon:
book, 2009This original book gives a revealing picture of the extraordinarily talented group of men and women who produced Horizon, the foremost literary review of the 1940s. Published monthly in Bloomsbury, Horizon was a cultural beacon during the dark days of the Second World War; it was brilliantly eclectic and fiercely independent. Its principal editor, Cyril Connolly, regarded the pleasures of life and art as inseparable, cultivating his love of literature with the same intensity that characterized his love of good food and fine wine, and beautiful women.
-
Neige
blogPost, 01/11/2013Neige, c’est l’histoire de trois personnes, un trio improbable pris au cœur d’une guerre impitoyable qui étend son souffle froid et ses tentacules de glace sur le monde.
-
Anna Kavan's eternal journey....
blogPost, 19/11/2009One of the most brilliant passages in Jennifer Sturm’s ‘Anna Kavan’s New Zealand’ concerns a visit to Hawke’s Bay. It is war time and the Kavanesque narrator - a woman not unidentitical to the author Kavan - is making her way out of New Zealand - one of the few places, ironically, she felt at peace. But she’s bursting to get away. Kavan was also a heroin addict, so probably New Zealand in 1942 wasn’t much chop.
-
Ice and Guilty by Anna Kavan
webpage, 24/09/2007About a year ago, I attended the guest of honor talk at ICon, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy convention. The speaker was Neil Gaiman, and his topic was dreams. With typical low-key irreverence, Mr. Gaiman sidestepped his assigned subject. Nothing, he claimed, is quite so boring as actual dreams, in which the mind's processing centers, cut off from the senses and from higher reasoning, continue to churn and light up, producing certainties and causal leaps ("and suddenly it wasn't my high school gym teacher; it was my mother" is my best recollection of Mr. Gaiman's way of describing this effect) that have no relation to logic, narrative, or even metaphor and symbolism. Anna Kavan's Ice unfolds with a similar dream-like logic.
-
What's the Story: Reading Anna Kavan's Ice
journalArticle,Anna Kavan's Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s.
-
Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me
blogPost, 06/08/2007Anna Kavan was the pen-name of Helen Woods (1901-68), a British writer and artist (her self-portrait can be seen here). By all accounts she was a deeply damaged individual: prone to mental illness and a lifelong heroin addict, she attempted suicide several times in the course of her life.
-
BOOK REVIEW: Ice by Anna Kavan. Interior landscapes cast in ice.
blogPost, 02/08/2013Kafka cavorts with Plath in this post-apocalyptic novel by the late Anna Kavan. A thermonuclear device has been detonated, and the world slowly awaits its fate as the planet freezes. In this new Ice Age, a nameless narrator searches for the girl he loves. But this isn’t just another version of love among the ruins. The imminent destruction of the world has set in motion the erosion of civilization. Random acts of violence and mass hysteria take over the cities, as the icebergs creep closer.
-
AK, Ice
blogPost, 01/09/2012Ice
-
Winter reads: Ice by Anna Kavan
newspaperArticle, 21/12/2011A frozen post-nuclear dystopia is the setting for this raw, brutal tale. It may not cheer you up, but it will compel your attention
-
Urban Gothic of the Second World War : Dark London
book, 01/04/2010This book examines 'home front' literature of the Second World War, arguing that Gothic tropes and forms mark moments of fracture in the national mythologies of wartime home, city and fellowship. These works in the Gothic mode subvert mythologies of nation that are still influential today. Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Elizabeth Bowen, Roy Fuller, Henry Green and others present counter-stories to the dominant national mythology of British survival and emotional resilience. In the texts of this monograph, the city grows strange, time distorts, and hallucinatory narrative voices depict a nightmare realm.
-
The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next
blogPost, 06/03/2012I’ve written before of how sometimes work, life generally, can wreck my reading of a book. A busy period, a week passes without a page turned, and suddenly a great book has become a chore. I don’t remember what’s going on or who the characters are or why the plot involves a chihuaha*. The book becomes staccato and dissolves into incoherence.
-
Winter Is Coming: Ice by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 20/03/2012From the outset it is obvious that Ice is a novel about obsession but it rapidly becomes clear that it is overwhelmingly about illness.
abstract
-
I love this photo of AK, The sleepwalker in the city...
blogPost, 16/06/2009Anna Kavan returned to war time Britain and spent the rest of her troubled life there. She continued to publish books. I remember seeing a book by her in the 1970s and thinking she was Eastern European. She's that strain of English writing which is Eurocentric, 'surrealiste' is the term she used. I have now finished the book and it's lodged in my mind as something rare and wonderful - the sound of a voice.
-
Anna Kavan
webpage,Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods on April 10, 1901 in Cannes, France of English parents (Claude Charles Edward Woods and Helen Bright). She was raised and educated in Europe and California. While the family was in Southern California, the father committed suicide; Helen was thirteen.
-
The Case of Anna Kavan’ by David Callard
magazineArticle, 25/02/1993During the war Anna Kavan worked for nearly two years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly.
-
Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience: Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Anaïs Nin, Maya Angelou, Billie Holiday, Nina Hagen, Diane Di Prima, Carrie Fisher, and Many Others
book, 2000-05-01• An anthology of writings by some of the most influential women in history on the often misunderstood and misrepresented female drug experience.• With great honesty, bravery, and frankness, women from diverse backgrounds write about their drug experiences.Women have been experimenting with drugs since prehistoric times, and yet published accounts of their views on the drug experience have been relegated to either antiseptic sociological studies or sensationalized stories splashed across the tabloids. The media has given us an enduring, but inaccurate, stereotype of a female drug user: passive, addicted, exploited, degraded, promiscuous. But the selections in this anthology--penned by such famous names as Billie Holiday, Anais Nin, Maya Angelou, and Carrie Fisher--show us that the real experiences of women are anything but stereotypical. Sisters of the Extreme provides us with writings by women from diverse occupations and backgrounds, from prostitute to physician, who through their use of drugs dared cross the boundaries set by society--often doing so with the hope of expanding themselves and their vision of the world. Whether with LSD, peyote, cocaine, heroine, MDMA, or marijuana, these women have sought to reach, through their experimentation, other levels of consciousness. Sometimes their quests have brought unexpected rewards, other times great suffering and misfortune. But wherever their trips have left them, these women have lived courageously--if sometimes dangerously--and written about their journeys eloquently.
-
Little Ice Age
encyclopediaArticle, 2016-08-22T00:02:11ZThe Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Optimum). While it was not a true ice age, the term was introduced into the scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939. It has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, or alternatively, from about 1300 to about 1850, although climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions. The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, each separated by intervals of slight warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report considered the timing and areas affected by the LIA suggested largely independent regional climate changes, rather than a globally synchronous increased glaciation. At most there was modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during the period. Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, an inherent variability in global climate, or decreases in the human population.
-
Urban Gothic of the Second World War : Dark London
book, 01/04/2010This book examines 'home front' literature of the Second World War, arguing that Gothic tropes and forms mark moments of fracture in the national mythologies of wartime home, city and fellowship. These works in the Gothic mode subvert mythologies of nation that are still influential today. Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Elizabeth Bowen, Roy Fuller, Henry Green and others present counter-stories to the dominant national mythology of British survival and emotional resilience. In the texts of this monograph, the city grows strange, time distorts, and hallucinatory narrative voices depict a nightmare realm.
-
Time Bites
book, 2004Towards the end of this long life, Goethe said that he had only just learned how to read. In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays - never before published in book form - we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has herself learned, over the course of a long, rich, life, to read the world differently.
-
Murmurations, uncanny stories about birds
book, 2011Freud observed that birds ‘don’t seem to be submitted to the same laws of gravity as us’, although without gravity they would die, as they need it to swallow. Birds are all around us; they could not be more familiar. And yet at the same time they are alien, unheimlich – uncanny. Award-winning editor Nicholas Royle brings together previously published stories by Daphne du Maurier, Anna Kavan, Russell Hoban and others with brand-new tales by contemporary writers including Bill Broady, Adam Marek, Regi Claire and many more.
-
Anna Kavan's eternal journey....
blogPost, 19/11/2009One of the most brilliant passages in Jennifer Sturm’s ‘Anna Kavan’s New Zealand’ concerns a visit to Hawke’s Bay. It is war time and the Kavanesque narrator - a woman not unidentitical to the author Kavan - is making her way out of New Zealand - one of the few places, ironically, she felt at peace. But she’s bursting to get away. Kavan was also a heroin addict, so probably New Zealand in 1942 wasn’t much chop.
-
Anna Kavan's New Zealand: a Pacific interlude in a turbulent life
book, 2009New Zealanders live 'in temporary shacks, uneasily, as reluctant campers too far from home', wrote Anna Kavan in a London magazine in 1943. Her seemingly negative comments created a stir both in the UK and New Zealand and suggested Kavan felt nothing but antipathy for the country. However, in researching this prize-winning author of nineteen books, Dr Jennifer Sturm uncovered letters and unpublished short stories written during Kavan's sojourn in New Zealand that show a more complex, affectionate and significant response. Those stories are published here for the first time, along with a fascinating discussion of this experimental writer and talented artist, who struggled with bouts of depression and insecurity, as well as heroin addiction and a stream of unconventional love affairs. Kavan roamed the world trying to find a home, and although her stay in New Zealand was for less than two years, her stories reveal a country where she found temporary peace, a country she captures in a warm and astute gaze. This book provides an intriguing insight, not only into the life and writing of Anna Kavan but also New Zealand of the 1940s.
-
Winstons dad’s been to library
blogPost, 03/05/2012Guilty by Anna Kavan – I think after reading Max’s post on Ice by Kavan I fancied trying here books so there was ice and this one on the library shelves so I choose this one a Kafkaesque style as mark struggles with life after his father returns from the war
-
I Am Lazarus: Stories by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 07/01/2015Unlike Julia and the Bazooka, this collection of Kavan’s short fiction was originally published during her lifetime, and the significance of this distinction is clear. This book is more balanced, with most if not all of the stories written during a period of Kavan’s life in wartime London following her return from living abroad. While there are a few that stray beyond the more obvious parallels to Kavan’s experience, such as the gothic tale ‘The Brother’ and the horror snapshot ‘The Gannets’, most stories here reflect that distinct time in her life.
-
Scholarly collaboration, with coffee
blogPost, 17/09/2014Last Friday saw the Anna Kavan editathon, a morning of editing the Wikipedia page about her. This collaboration was the brainchild of Catherine Lenoble (User:Cathsign), a French writer whose first edit was a year ago at the Ada Lovelace Day event in Brussels. London is an expensive place to stay, so many of the symposium attendees left immediately afterwards, but remote participation in the editathon was made easier by an etherpad.
-
Anna Kavan "I am Lazarus" - Spoiler!
blogPost, 06/01/2011The short story "The Brother" is another stunner. The narrator talks of being a sickly child, well taken care of by his mother while his brother is hardy and beautiful. He tells us that he has great regret about his treatment of his brother. He was always quarrelsome and hid behind his illnesses to be unkind to his brother and his friends. The brother was kind and always tried to bring a smile to the narrators face, though he was never rewarded with one.
coverage
description
22-rdf-syntax-ns#value
- #item_482
- #item_358
surname
- N54bed1acbd54491b909b7e99a4d2d25c