To After That (TOAF)
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.
Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.
TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slippery and stimulating novella from Gladman (Calamities), which was originally published in 2008, explores the writing process behind one of her unpublished novels and the relationship between writing and living. The story begins with Gladman as a 20-something poet in an unnamed city in the mid-1990s. Drawing inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's film Red Desert and a fictional film about two Black women artists who are lovers, she begins writing a novel called After That to express what it feels like to be alive, attempting to develop a plot out of her distaste for cellphones and her unease about gentrification (as the reader learns from a partial summary of After That, a pivotal scene involves a neighbor annoying Gladman's narrator by showing up in her apartment while talking on a cellphone). Incredibly, Gladman pulls off a story about a failed piece of writing that doesn't feel self-indulgent. Instead, it's packed with wonderfully strange ideas (while writing After That, Gladman wondered if she was existing in the realm of fiction), and it builds to a clarifying conclusion about the relief of letting a project go. This is a marvel.
