Is Anna a drug heroin ?
drug addict
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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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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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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.
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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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A stranger on Earth: the life and work of Anna Kavan
book, 2006None
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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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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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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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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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Ice-maiden stung by a spider: 'Change the Name'
newspaperArticle, 05/06/1993ANNA KAVAN wrote quite a few novels, some under her own real name. She is better known in Europe, but if her reputation here is still small it is secure and growing. The nets of mystification she wove about herself have frayed a little, but her intention that her life should not be known frustrates biographers.
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AK, Ice
blogPost, 01/09/2012Ice
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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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Portrait of the Artist as the Books He’s Loved
blogPost, 11/10/2011My first encounter with Anna Kavan came via an image found trawling through a friend’s flicker page. There is a lovely group of really wonderful women I have met online via my obsession with the 60s & 70s films of the fantastique, and “Oola” is one acquaintance I was particularly bewitched by. She seemed to have impeccable taste and a wonderfully exciting life (from what I could see of it online), so the combination of my experience with the owner of the book and the cover of the book itself, I immediately requested the book from inter-library-loan (at the time, Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka was out of print).
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Anna Kavan and the Politics of Madness
audioRecording,Author Anna Kavan’s critical and popular reception since her death in 1968 has been defined by a cult of personality fuelled by revelations about her psychiatric breakdown, heroin use and adoption of her own fictional character’s name. Victoria Walker unravels some of the accumulated mythology around this writer, and examines her complex association with, and interest in, early twentieth-century psychiatry and psychotherapy.
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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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Sunday Caught My Interest
blogPost, 03/04/2011The latter happened when I read John Self’s review of Anna Kravan’s Ice. I was intrigued by Anna’s story (physiological issues, heroin addiction, renaming herself after one of her own character’s, etc.) but the book itself didn’t seem like my thing. And then I clicked on a book John mentions in the review and found his review of Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation.
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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.
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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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Bibliography: the seed
blogPost, 13/05/2013This is the first mention of Anna Kavan in my writing. During a panel, after a discussion turned to authors and addictions, a student approached the microphone and asked “What about Anna Kavan? She wrote Julia and the Bazooka, which is about her heroin addiction.”
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"Neige" de Anna Kavan aux Editions Cambourakis
blogPost, 06/11/2013Une romancière singulière, un roman autre. L’appel de la blanche, de la poudreuse, en avalanche. Au creux de chaque ligne, une neige hypnotique et virginale délestant toute trace de vie.
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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, Asylum piece, 1940
blogPost, 16/09/2009A l’origine, la photo d’une femme au visage serein, souriant… Derrière laquelle se cache un monde asilaire, une femme glaciaire, lointaine, un écrivain hors du commun.
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Anna Kavan and libraries
blogPost, 14/06/2009I love the way with libraries you go in there, drift around and often seem to arrive, as if with a sense of predestination, before a book. This book, once you pick it up - there’s something almost magnetic happening here - now opens at a particular page. It is all random - or else it is the magic which accrues to the long time searcher and reader. This happened to me yesterday. I was browsing in the Auckland Public Library heritage room. I saw a book called Anna Kavan’s New Zealand. I picked it up, the book fell open and immediately I spied the word Napier.
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Heroin, madness and men: a hell of a life
newspaperArticle, September 3, 2001Self-loathing, abuse and drug addiction plagued novelist Anna Kavan but also inspired her best work, says Virginia Ironside. It's time her genius was recognised.
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Rhys Davies: A Writer’s Life
book, 01/09/2013Rhys Davies (1901-78) was among the most dedicated, prolific and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers, in both the short story and the novel form. By temperament a loner, he gave up his life entirely to his writing. A homosexual in the days before the Sexual Offences Act, he maintained complete discretion and ‘acted straight’. The only woman to whom he was drawn was Anna Kavan (1901-68), a fellow-novelist and drug addict, whom he saved from suicide on two occasions.
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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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Amongst those left: the british experimental novel 1940-1980
book, 2012None
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Anna Kavan © Orlando Project
webpage, 2006-2014Women's Writing in the British isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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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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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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Quand la folie se racontait: récit et antipsychiatrie
book, 1990De Unica Zurn à 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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The case of Anna Kavan: a biography
book, 1992None
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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
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Book Review: Ice, Anna Kavan (1967)
blogPost, 01/02/2015Anna Kavan’s masterful post-apocalyptical novel Ice (1967) parallels the death throws of a relationship with the disintegration of the world. As the unnamed narrator (N) and the girl (G) traverse an indistinct, interchangeable, world transformed by glacial encroachment, only the same movements are possible: flight, pursuit, flight, pursuit… Repetition reinforces the profoundly unnerving feel of both physical and mental imprisonment: as movements are predicted, trauma is repeated.
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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions N. XXXVIII (Spinrad + Harrison + Kavan + Effinger)
blogPost, 19/09/2012Ah, when I have access to a massive inexpensive catalogue (Marx Books) the quality of my finds goes up and up…..
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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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Burroughs / Writers on Heroin
blogPost, 23/02/2011WSB's D.O.C. was of course heroin. This lead me to thinking of other opiate friendly writers. There are not that many distinguished candidates, alcoholic writers, on the other hand, are ten a penny. There are probably a greater number of alcoholic Nobel prize winning writers. Here is a partial list - Will Self, Roberto Bolano, Anna Kavan, Aleister Crowley, Jim Carroll, Mary Butts**, Elizabeth Strong, Irvine Welsh. Some observers are not sure Bolano was much of a user.
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drogSF : stupéfiantes fictions
webpage,Le terme de drogue recouvre une grande diversité de substances aux effets très différents. Les dépresseurs [barbituriques, opiacés, alcool..] provoquent une sensation de calme, un relâchement musculaire et la ralentissement des mouvements et des réflexes, accompagnés d’un sentiment de calme et de bien-être.
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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's New Zealand
blogPost, 30/09/2009Come along and hear Jennifer Sturm, author of Anna Kavan’s New Zealand, talk about Anna Kavan, an 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.
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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.
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Lesser known Masterpieces of Literary Smut
blogPost, 27/10/2012Ice by Anna Kavan – not conventionally erotic but hauntingly sadistic and compelling. Woman and man in pursuit of each other, a world encroached by ice, a prisoner escaping her jailer.The ice is encroaching global winter but also the white powder Kavan couldn’t do without
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Honeysuckle girl
book, 1975The relationship between Welsh novelist Rhys Davies and cult author Anna Kavan is a fascinating one. I guess what drew them together must have been their outsider status - Davies the closeted homosexual and Kavan the secret heroin addict.
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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.
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Neige
blogPost, 31/10/2013J’ai choisi ce roman à cause de son titre, de sa couverture et de sa quatrième de couverture, et afin de découvrir une publication "adulte" de cette maison d'édition dont je ne connaissais que la section jeunesse. Il y avait quelque chose de très recherché dans la verticalité du titre (comme dans le logo de la maison d'éditions) qui m’a interpellé, avec le nom de l'auteure qui forment une croix.
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Books read in August
blogPost, 02/09/2012Sleep Has His House – Anna Kavan Unique. In my experience. I can think of no other novel that I have read that comes anywhere near this. Based in part on her own life and withdrawal from the world, it is a truly surreal journey from day into night, from reality into dreams, from normality into a world of symbolism that is cut off from the mainstream. Yet it manages at the same to imply that, in fact, the night and the dreams and the symbols are a much more fundamental reality underlying the chaotic world in which we are expected to live.
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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.
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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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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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La corte gay di Anna Kavan
blogPost, 14/02/2013Nata a Cannes quasi per casa, ma cresciuta in Inghilterra ed in America, Anna Kavan ebbe un’infanzia solitaria, agiata ma profondamente infelice, contrassegnata da un rapporto difficilissimo con la ricchissima madre e dal suicidio dell’amatissimo padre. I suoi matrimoni, ben due, furono fallimentari, la sua dipendenza della morfina una costante di tutta la sua vita. Umanamente la sua predilezione, quando si trattava di stringere nuove amicizie, era per gli omosessuali.
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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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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 (1901-1968)
blogPost, 04/09/2007Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in Cannes, France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriot British parents. Anna spent her childhood in several European countries, California and England. She completed her education in England. She married (Donald Ferguson) and for a time lived in Burma.
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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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Doom & Gloom From Anna Kavan
blogPost, 19/08/2006In an effort to depress myself, I'm reading another one of Anna Kavan's early books: "Change the Name" from 1941, written before she really DID change her name from "Helen Ferguson" to "Anna Kavan." (Anna's sad childhood, depression, heroin addiction, and coping methods are fascinating reading...get her biography if you can).
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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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SHAUN HAMILTON’S BOOK REVIEWS: WHO ARE YOU? by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 29/08/2014This is the first time I’ve read an Anna Kavan novel, which, given the brief biography on the book’s rear, seems amazing: a heroin addict for most of her adult life; time spent in mental asylums; changed her name to that of one of her characters. How the hell did I miss her?
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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.”
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Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan
blogPost, 16/01/2008The relationship between Welsh novelist Rhys Davies and cult author Anna Kavan is a fascinating one. I guess what drew them together must have been their outsider status - Davies the closeted homosexual and Kavan the secret heroin addict.
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Uncovering a real gem
newspaperArticle, 11/07/2009Anna Kavan's New Zealand is a modest looking book which holds within it a kind of time-bomb. The explosiveness relates to Kavan's strangely powerful, even hypnotic talent. Kavan was a bottle blonde who washed up in New Zealand at that most dangerous of hours - 1942.
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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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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, 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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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.
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Anna Kavan’s Nocturnal Language
blogPost, 19/10/08work & life
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Julia and the Bazooka
blogPost, 17/09/2009Anna Kavan is the author of Ice, a surreal sci-fi masterpiece about a woman and two barely distinguishable sadistic men, one who has enslaved her, and one who wishes to. The world is slowly turning to ice. She has the incredibly smooth and detached voice of mid-century English fiction, flawlessly written and absolutely clear, like Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. The subject is always herself. This is what links her early realist work to her later surreal stuff. Anna Kavan (it is a nom de plume, taken from the protagonist of an early novel) was a lifelong heroin addict. She was suicidal. She called her syringe her bazooka. Hence the title of her last collection of short stories, Julia and the Bazooka.
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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.
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The Strange Case of AK
blogPost, 03/07/2007The first blog entry I ever wrote had something to do with Anna Kavan; I think I was reading her book "Let Me Alone" at the time. I've just finished George Saunder's "In Persuasion Nation" -- funny, cynical, nasty, and ultimately touching -- and tonight, waiting anxiously for a thunderstorm that is taking its own sweet time arriving, I'm following it up with Kavan's "Mercury."
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Anna Kavan
forumPost, 19/03/14Je viens d' apprendre - et c' est aussi pour cela que j' ai décidé de lui faire une place ici- que le merveilleux éditeur Cambourakis, spécialiste des rééditions qui s' imposent ou encore de livres vraiment originaux, était en train de la rééditer. Qu' il soit ici remercié !
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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 : Ice
blogPost, 31/03/2011Anna Kavan is one of those writers I’ve been meaning to read for years, assured that hers was exactly the sort of low-tog-rating fiction I claim to seek. At the same time her most famous novel, Ice, seemed like the sort of book which didn’t need to be read at all: one of those where the blurb and chat around it seemed to say all that needed to be said. It’s easy to summarise but hard to write about: at least that’s my excuse.
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The Parson - Anna Kavan
blogPost, 05/11/2007I picked up another of Anna Kavan's remarkable novels, The Parson, one of the last of her books to be published and this one post humously after the discovery of the manuscript in amongst Anna Kavan's papers at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Anna Kavan : Asylum Piece (1940)
blogPost, 06/07/2012Anna Kavan (1901–68) was born Helen Woods, although she initially wrote as Helen Ferguson, her married name. Following the failure of her second marriage and one of many nervous breakdowns she changed her name to Anna Kavan, the main character of her novel Let Me Alone (1930). Asylum Piece is a collection of short stories which her publisher Peter Owen describes as 'mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical'. The cover shows Karl Theodor Bluth, the doctor who prescribed Kavan's heroin and co-wrote The Horse's Tail (1949) with her.