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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
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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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
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 Thus does one of Anna Kavan’s characters describe herself in an unpublished short story, and we know that, as in much of Kavan’s writing, she was describing herself.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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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.
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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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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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The World Within Fiction Illuminating Neuroses Of Our Time
book,with an introduction and analyses by Frederic Wertham, M.D. Included are selections from E.T.A. Hoffman, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Aiken, E.B. White, Anna Kavan, Truman Capote, Edita Morris, Coates, James Still, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner
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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, '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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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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Asylum Piece - Anna Kavan
blogPost, 18/04/2011Anna Kavan – a character’s name from one of her earlier works, adopted by the author who went on to produce some astonishing work that is all too sadly neglected these days, despite the unflagging championship by her publisher. This was the first of her ‘new’ work, a series of interlinked vignettes that explore her recent experiences of breakdown and confinement in an asylum.
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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
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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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The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy
book, 1995We devotees of SF enjoy its diversity of opinion, the bustle of bright and dark, the clash of progress and entropy, the clamour of theories about the past, the future, the ever-present present, everything. In this fascinating collection of essays, one of the world's pre-eminent SF writers explores a wide range of SF and fantasy writers and writing.
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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: 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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.