Machines in the Head
Selected Short Writing
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Described by Brian Aldiss as "De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister," junkie, depressive, radical, enigma, cult figure, genre-bending experimental writer and artist—few women writers have gathered the same air of mystique, so often the preserve of male counter-culture figures, as Helen Woods, more commonly known by her adopted pen name and persona: Anna Kavan. This anthology of Anna Kavan's short fiction and journalism marks the 50 years since her death in 1968, offering an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of her diverse literary talents for her fans. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of science-fiction wonder, the selection is taken from across Kavan's oeuvre, representing the best of her writing and showing the range of her style. Readers will encounter oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and incarceration from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958) and stories of heroin addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Her science-fiction stories will appeal to fans of her final novel Ice, while the previously unpublished 'Starting a Career' is a futuristic spy-thriller. Writing for the magazine Horizon between 1943 and 1946, Kavan revealed her personal and political views. She was pacifist, nihilist, atheist and vehemently anti-fascist; she implicitly believed in people's mutual responsibility for one another and was preoccupied with those who were dispossessed, marginalized or alone. Her book reviews reveal something of her literary tastes and influences as well as being a platform for her beliefs regarding psychology, ethics and the importance of art and literature in turbulent times. Machines in the Head shows the extraordinary range of Kavan's work, which is, by turns, moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling but always distinctive and unique.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kavan's inventive and chilling collection (after Ice), renders a sustained expression of despair from a writer who suffered from mental illness and heroin addiction, and died in 1968, at age 67. Many of the stories are set in mid-century psychiatric institutions. In "Airing a Grievance," the unnamed narrator has been assigned to a psychiatrist-like "adviser" she hesitates to trust, and in "Face of My People," the cruel Dr. Pope ominously compares his war-traumatized patients to oysters and decides "to try a little forcible opening" into the mind of a stubbornly taciturn patient. Bloody car accidents occur in multiple stories, offering a stage for the narrators to reflect on the world's moments of random cruelty. In "Fog," a driver seeks salvation in drugs, which only make her numb to an accident she causes, driving on "as if nothing had happened," while in "The Old Address," the narrator is struck by a car and drowns all the passersby in her blood, thinking, "at last I'm being revenged on those who have persecuted me all my life." While the ceaseless inner torment can become a burden for the reader, flights of fantasy come as welcome relief, such as the freewheeling "Five More Days to Countdown," in which the heroic Esmerelda and her lover escape a student revolt via helicopter. Fans of Doris Lessing will appreciate these shattered glimpses into Kavan's creative mind.
