Who are Anna’s critics from the first hours ?
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Unveiling Anna Kavan
webpage,Devotees of Anna Kavan may well be surprisedùand perhaps a little put offùthat Peter Owen Publishers has brought out another biography of the acclaimed and esoteric author (Asylum Piece, Sleep Has this House, Ice, and Mercury). However, Jeremy Reed's prying book, A Stranger on Earth, has unearthed original material that uncovers a whole lot about someone who went to great lengths to turn herself into an enigma for posterity.
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The Mysterious Anna Kavan
blogPost, 08/01/2006’ve been reading Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece. It’s a stunning collection, each story stranger and more intense than the last.
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“My somewhat tortured love affair with modernism...
blogPost, 14/11/2012“ “My somewhat tortured love affair with modernism began when I was working in a bookshop in London, reading these amazing women writers of that period who I had never heard of previously, obscure...
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Ice by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 09/11/2011Ice by Anna Kavan was 70% off, I do not know the writer, but after reading Doris Lessing’s comment, I carted it off with the rest of the titles for purchase. The eerie and strangeness of the story seems an exciting read. I am intrigued how a heroine addict writes one of slipstream’s most significant novel.
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Anna Kavan Symposium
webpage, 11/09/2014A one-day symposium at the Institute of English Studies in association with Liverpool John Moores University Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History and Peter Owen Publishers.
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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.
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Literary Heroines to Love: Anna Kavan
magazineArticle, 07/122008This week is the fortieth anniversary of Anna Kavan’s death. Although these days she remains largely unmentioned by the mainstream media, without her the modern literary landscape that we know and love would be much more barren. Canonised female authors from Anais Nin to Virginia Woolf owe much of their experimental style and strength of voice to Anna Kavan.
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On Anna Kavan
blogPost, 09/12/2011Anna Kavan, born Helen Ferguson in 1901 was a very English - and at the same time utterly alien - novelist whose own life took on the quality of an existential mystery. Praised by JG Ballard and Doris Lessing, drawing on Kafka and anticipating slipstream long before it became a genre in British writing, her novels described eerie states of dislocation; a lifelong heroin user, her prose has a needle-sharp precision but her subject matter was never drugs.
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Mon âme en Chine - Anna KAVAN
encyclopediaArticle, 15/03/2005Une femme rêve : Je suis seule dans un train, dans un compartiment de seconde classe ; au lieu de bagages, au lieu de cerveau, je porte une masse serrée de minuscules serpents gris dans mon crâne, (p. 14) De qui sont ces serpents ?
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Anna Kavan: The Best Kept Secret Of English Modernism
blogPost, 01/02/2014We have dedicated this section of the website to the passing on of the good word of short story collections that we feel have been either been missed or forgotten about, for one reason or another, but that deserve and need to be read. The first one I’ve selected is Julia and the Bazooka by Anna Kavan. Anna who? Exactly.
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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.
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Found Guilty: Anna Kavan's latest novel
newspaperArticle, 28/06/2007A lost manuscript of a novel by the British writer Anna Kavan - which turned up at the University of Tulsa of all places - will be published next week. I, for one, am deliriously happy about the publication of Guilty, since Anna Kavan, who died in 1968, is one our greatest and most original novelists.
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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.
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Anna Kavan : Neige
blogPost, 15/01/2013Ces derniers temps, j'ai eu la chance de ne lire que des bons livres mais, je dois bien avouer, rien d'aussi singulier et sublime que ce roman cauchemardesque aux réminiscences "ballardiennes" (le Ballard première période). J'ai découvert cette Anna Kavan, en perpétuelle dépression et morte le nez dans la neige (trop facile, pardonnez-moi !), chez Discipline in Disorder, where else ?
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10 More Great Writers Nobody Reads
blogPost, 18/02/2016At Writers No One Reads, our infrequently updated blog dedicated to overlooked, under-read, marginalized, minor, peripheral, goofy, weird, forsaken, out-of-fashion, overlooked, ahead of their time, and justly and unjustly obscure writers...
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Blazing the Trail: An interview with Peter Owen
blogPost, 2009-11-24T16:09:07+00:00On several occasions I met Dalí. He was pretty unpleasant; not directly unpleasant – he wasn’t nasty. He was a major artist, but I felt he lacked integrity. I was there once and during the course o…
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AK (bis) / Obsessionnel.
blogPost, 04/07/2012Les six pages signées Anna Kavan sortent de nulle part. Aucune trace dans les recueils traduits ou les rares articles consacrés à l'écrivaine anglaise, à peine connue de quelques lecteurs français, les moindres n'étant pas Viviane Forrester, Claire Malroux ou Christine Jordis, talentueuses passeuses.
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The Novel of the Future
book, 1968In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in literature, film, art, and dance—to arrive at a new synthesis for the young artist struggling against the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of modern fiction.
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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.
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Sleep Does Not Have His House: Anna Kavan
blogPost, 20/01/2007A very rare bout of insomnia seems like the perfect time to discuss dreams. Well, I did sleep for a few hours and woke up after a particularly vivid dream. Which I will not describe.
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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.
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Anna Kavan’s Nocturnal Language
blogPost, 19/10/08work & life
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10 More Great Writers Nobody Reads
blogPost, 18/02/2016At Writers No One Reads, our infrequently updated blog dedicated to overlooked, under-read, marginalized, minor, peripheral, goofy, weird, forsaken, out-of-fashion, overlooked, ahead of their time, and justly and unjustly obscure writers...
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Anna Kavan
blogPost, 25/07/2010whenever i discover an artist who has something to say that i want to hear, i’m firstly grateful for their work having found me & then i’m sort of shocked that it’s taken so long, & left wondering where they’ve been all my life. i just bought a brand new 2009 reprint of anna kavan‘s ‘julia & the bazooka‘ for 2.99 from a bookshop in waterloo.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing and bath plugs
blogPost, 26/05/2007Anna who? Hmm is it just me again? Anna Kavan nee Helen Woods, then Ferguson, born in Cannes probably in 1901, two divorces, nervous breakdowns, heroin addiction, name changes.
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Doris Lessing reviews new Anna Kavan bio
blogPost, 17/08/2006A new biography of Anna Kavan, A Stranger on Earth, by that pest Jeremy Reed is reviewed by Doris Lessing here: Independent Online Edition > Reviews. I call Jeremy Reed a pest because he has managed to write either Fiction or Non-Fiction on nearly ever fun subject. Every time I turn around to see what's been written about Rimbaud or Artaud, there's that damn Jeremy Reed. And now he has this biography coming out on my favorite fiction writer, Anna Kavan. Underappreciated she is, but then again you might easily believe that this is the way she would have wanted it. Her work has often been compared to Doris Lessing, so her thoughts on the subject are relevant:
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Neige, de Anna Kavan
blogPost, 11/10/2013Bon, donc, séance de rattrapage, sur qui sur quoi ? Là, en commençant mon article, je ne savais même pas, et puis finalement j’ai décidé de parler de Neige, de Anna Kavan, paru aux éditions Cambourakis il y a peu.
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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.
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Anna Kavan, 'Julia and the Bazooka': a critique
blogPost, 15/12/2013Writers such as Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard have praised the writings of Anna Kavan, but I find her work uneven – I couldn’t get beyond the first few pages of self-indulgent, rambling dream visions in Sleep Has His House, first published in 1948. Julia and the Bazooka is also uneven, but serves as a good introduction to the qualities (and weaknesses) of Kavan’s fiction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anna Kavan, 'Julia and the Bazooka': a critique
blogPost, 15/12/2013Writers such as Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard have praised the writings of Anna Kavan, but I find her work uneven – I couldn’t get beyond the first few pages of self-indulgent, rambling dream visions in Sleep Has His House, first published in 1948. Julia and the Bazooka is also uneven, but serves as a good introduction to the qualities (and weaknesses) of Kavan’s fiction.
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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.
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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
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Anna Kavan
webpage,‘I was about to become the world’s best kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be.’ Thus does one of Anna Kavan’s characters describe herself in an unpublished short story, and we know that, as in much of Kavan’s writing, she was describing herself. An enigma the author remains, but her talent was none the less remarkable, and her works have been compared to that of Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka and acclaimed by writers from Anaïs Nin to J.B. Ballard.
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Mercury by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 06/07/2012I thought from what was said about Anna Kavan's Mercury that it would be litfic uncomfortably fitted into the fantasy genre. This was largely confirmed when I saw that Doris Lessing had written the foreword, and what she had said about the book. Litfic and I seem to have an uneasy relationship. I generally don't like it, I'm getting the feeling I must be some sort of literary philistine.
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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.
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Play sheds new light on strange friendship of Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan
blogPost, 10/09/2013The team behind the acclaimed play about David Lloyd George - The Wizard, The Goat and the Man Who Won the War - is to offer a new insight into the mysterious friendship between Valleys writer Rhys Davies and cult literary figure Anna Kavan.
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Anna Kavan
webpage,‘I was about to become the world’s best kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be.’ Thus does one of Anna Kavan’s characters describe herself in an unpublished short story, and we know that, as in much of Kavan’s writing, she was describing herself. An enigma the author remains, but her talent was none the less remarkable, and her works have been compared to that of Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka and acclaimed by writers from Anaïs Nin to J.B. Ballard.
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Anna Kavan: The Best Kept Secret Of English Modernism
blogPost, 01/02/2014We have dedicated this section of the website to the passing on of the good word of short story collections that we feel have been either been missed or forgotten about, for one reason or another, but that deserve and need to be read. The first one I’ve selected is Julia and the Bazooka by Anna Kavan. Anna who? Exactly.
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Anais Nin – Dominions
blogPost, 30/10/2015 -
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.
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Anna Kavan
webpage,‘I was about to become the world’s best kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be.’ Thus does one of Anna Kavan’s characters describe herself in an unpublished short story, and we know that, as in much of Kavan’s writing, she was describing herself. An enigma the author remains, but her talent was none the less remarkable, and her works have been compared to that of Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka and acclaimed by writers from Anaïs Nin to J.B. Ballard.
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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.
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Love & Loss: Stories of the Heart
book, 1993The works of Jane Bowles, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, and other distinctive voices of the 20th century are gathered here for the first time in a collection of 18 variously lyrical, piquant and bold stories which explore women's lives and loves, embracing moments daring and commonplace, public and private.
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On Anna Kavan
blogPost, 09/12/2011Anna Kavan, born Helen Ferguson in 1901 was a very English - and at the same time utterly alien - novelist whose own life took on the quality of an existential mystery. Praised by JG Ballard and Doris Lessing, drawing on Kafka and anticipating slipstream long before it became a genre in British writing, her novels described eerie states of dislocation; a lifelong heroin user, her prose has a needle-sharp precision but her subject matter was never drugs.
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Anna Kavan: The Best Kept Secret Of English Modernism
blogPost, 01/02/2014We have dedicated this section of the website to the passing on of the good word of short story collections that we feel have been either been missed or forgotten about, for one reason or another, but that deserve and need to be read. The first one I’ve selected is Julia and the Bazooka by Anna Kavan. Anna who? Exactly.
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Whirlwind
blogPost, 28/09/2011I love the North London Line, and this was a perfect North London afternoon. There is something magical and breathless about the city in the embrace of an Indian summer, and yesterday I had the joy of experiencing it again when Chris and I went up to town for the launch of the Solaris anthology House of Fear. We spent the afternoon in Kensington, having lunch near Holland Park and then making our way across to Hillsleigh Road and nearby Peel Street, both once home to the writer Anna Kavan.
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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.
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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
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Anna Kavan: The Best Kept Secret Of English Modernism
blogPost, 01/02/2014We have dedicated this section of the website to the passing on of the good word of short story collections that we feel have been either been missed or forgotten about, for one reason or another, but that deserve and need to be read. The first one I’ve selected is Julia and the Bazooka by Anna Kavan. Anna who? Exactly.
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Mon âme en Chine - Anna KAVAN
encyclopediaArticle, 15/03/2005Une femme rêve : Je suis seule dans un train, dans un compartiment de seconde classe ; au lieu de bagages, au lieu de cerveau, je porte une masse serrée de minuscules serpents gris dans mon crâne, (p. 14) De qui sont ces serpents ?
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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.
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Novel Approach: Peter Owen
magazineArticle, 01/02/2011The cult junkie author Anna Kavan, whom Nin admired, owes her posthumous reputation to Owen, who has singlehandedly kept her work in print. The author of Ice, who died in 1968 with enough heroin stockpiled in her house to kill the whole street, did so on the night she was expected at one of Peter Owen’s parties. When the police broke in the door, they found the gold invitation, so Owen was the first person they called. “I didn’t realise at the time that I was dealing with a really major writer who would become a cult figure,” Owen admits. She was also rather difficult to deal with. After one brusque encounter with Kavan, Owen was told by a mutual friend, “You’ve got off lightly tonight. The last time I was here she threw a chicken at me.”
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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.
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Neige - Anna KAVAN
book, 16/3/2009Un personnage dont on ne sait pas le nom cherche, dans un, puis un autre pays, jamais précisés, une fille qui le hante et dont une seule particularité est mise en relief : Sa chevelure (...), d'un blanc argenté, celle d'un albinos, étincelante comme le clair de lune... Parfois un troisième personnage se dresse entre le quêteur et l'objet de la quête ; on n'en connaît que la fonction : Gouverneur.
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Anna Kavan: Letter to her publisher
blogPost, 10/04/2011Anna Kavan: Letter to her publisher
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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.
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Livres de Noël : la Neige hallucinatoire d’Anna Kavan
blogPost, 06/12/2013l’approche des fêtes, Lyon Capitale vous propose chaque jour jusqu’à Noël sa sélection dans les vitrines des libraires. Aujourd’hui, un roman d’Anna Kavan qui nous revient des années 1970.