« kavan land »
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PeterOwenPublishers
blogPost,Blogposts related to Kavan
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sombre indifference and a talking book
blogPost, 03/07/2009I live in a geographically isolated place, Napier. It takes five hours driving to reach Auckland, the city in which I grew up. When I was a kid we used to come down and visit my grandmother in Napier. There was one part of the road which was notorious. This was the Napier-Taupo road. It starts off being very flat then you enter a series of corrugations where the hills become increasingly moutainous, until you lose cellphone contact and there are no houses. It is very beautiful. Strangely beautiful.
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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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Christopher Priest: The Glamour
blogPost, 10/05/2012The Glamour (1984) is the novel Priest published after The Affirmation, and it is a development of some of the ideas and themes in that book. It has narrative switches and stories within stories; like The Affirmation it is a work of slipstream fiction, where two worlds – two genres – rub shoulders and even merge. It is also – and here is where Priest’s assertion of genre exploration makes sense – a book which tests and teases the reader of mainstream fiction. It would not be surprising if it was inspired in part by Anna Kavan’s Ice (to which Priest has written a foreword).
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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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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 : 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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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
webpage, 01/04/2012This body of work by Heather and Ivan Morison draws on the life and works of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan (1901-1968). Kavan, born Helen Ferguson, produced a large body of elusive and strange work that operated somewhere between biography and science fiction, drawing on her own turbulent life. Anna is an allegorical piece of object theatre that tells a brutal tale of love and loss set against the approaching threat of ‘the ice’.
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Tell me a story…
blogPost, 11/02/2012Anna, the Morisons’ installation at the Hepworth Wakefield, evokes presence in a different way. Based on the life and work of cult novelist Anna Kavan, it grasps for archetypes and universals through coded messages.
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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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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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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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HEATHER & IVAN MORISON, BEN RIVERS, DAVID THORPE | What's On | Hepworth Wakefield
webpage, 11/02/2012This was the first in a regular series of spring exhibitions that explore common concerns and themes in the work of some of the most innovative contemporary artists. Heather and Ivan Morison, Ben Rivers and David Thorpe use film, sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions regarding our relationship to nature and what happens when man-made and natural worlds collide.These exhibitions explore utopian beliefs and practices and an impending sense of apocalypse. Heather and Ivan Morison presented a new body of work using objects, performance and puppetry to draw on the life and work of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan.
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endvisions
blogPost, 14/01/2012re: the apocalypse
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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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Anna: A Love Story For Puppets | ...ment
webpage,Puppet show based upon the novel Ice and the life of the book’s author Anna Kavan. First performed at Eastside Projects, Birmingham on 9th September 2011. The voiceover artists were Dermot Keaney as thehe Warden, Victoria Lewis as the Girl, and Rain Peak Morison as the Child. The puppeteers were Owen Davies as the Girl and Ivan Morison as the Warden.
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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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Silverglass | Performances | Taliesin
webpage, 11/09/2013A master-craftsman of Welsh fiction, Rhys Davies combined pin-point observation of Valleys life with a twinkling sense of comedy. His long-term friend Anna Kavan wrote dark and troubled novels described by J.G. Ballard as “somewhere between poetry and madness”. Each lived a life of self-invention, in which secrets, sexuality and deep questions of personal identity lurked constantly in the shadows. D.J. Britton’s high-energy play is set in the late 1960s when Davies’ late literary recognition and Kavan’s final tragedy came together like a thunderclap.
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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 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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Cold print
blogPost, 21/10/2009This time of year I usually re-read Ray Bradbury’s The October Country because . . . well, do I really need to explain why? But Jonathan Lethem is looking ahead to winter with a list of his favorite icy books.
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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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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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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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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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Who Are You?
blogPost, 12/06/2007It's Anna Kavan time again. I'm enjoying tuning into her writing so much and having just finished her 1963 novel Who Are You? I think there is no doubt I will now have to read everything by and about her..thanks Kit at Peter Owen!
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Ice
blogPost, 27/03/2012I first heard of Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967, but republished in 2006 by Peter Owen) when John Self reviewed it on his blog almost exactly a year ago, and it went right onto my list of books to check out in the future.
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2666 and what I learned from Anna Kavan
blogPost, 28/05/2009Right now I’m reading Ice by Anna Kavan. Scant 150 pages of flat characterization and a fantastic, visceral, amorphous ice world that includes a dragon.
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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 : 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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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.