$16 168pp / paperback
978-0-9844693-2-1
The second volume of Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy continues the author’s profound meditation upon translation and the ephemeral.
The Ravickians narrates the day-long odyssey of Luswage Amini, the Great Ravickian Novelist, who journeys through the city to attend the reading of an old friend. Where the earlier volume, Event Factory, explores Ravicka from the outside, via a visitor’s attempt to understand and interpret that city’s irreducible strangeness, The Ravickians faces the problem of translation from the perspective of an insider who struggles, throughout her account, to make plain the political and personal crises of Ravickian life that she knows to be untranslatable.
“Event Factory is a profound study of the architecture of being, knowledge, memory, and desire.” —John Madera, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“[L]ike a static sculpture that also seems constantly in motion or a dance momentarily evoking an architectural shape, Renee Gladman’s excellently strange new work Event Factory is a deliberate and skillfully sustained act of contradiction.” —Eugene Lim
“Event Factory calls attention to the desperateness of being human—how often I fumble and how simultaneously anxious and terrified I am for and of intimacies not only through the body, but also through language.” —Danielle Vogel, Denver Quarterly
“There are passages in Event Factory which are furiously beautiful. The evening air is ‘tender’; the light is ‘yellow’; the morning is a ‘greener yellow at the start of the day but every moment growing golden.’ Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. And while it’s probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman’s project, it must be said that Event Factory, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. It makes great, unpredictable company.” —Adam Novy, Dossier
Renee Gladman was born in Atlanta in 1971. She received a B.A. in philosophy from Vassar College, and a Master’s degree in poetics from New College of California. She is the author of five other works of prose, including Juice and The Activist, and one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Since 2005, she has operated Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought-projects based in the sentence, making occasional forays into poetry. She teaches in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University.
esperanza, 2005 (hope)
gouache and ink on wood
24 in x 36 in
by Gisela Insuaste
Gisela Insuaste received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Anthropology & Studio Art from Dartmouth. She has participated in exhibitions and projects in venues nationwide, including Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, IL; Krannert Art Museum-UIUC, Champaign, IL; and Bucket Rider Gallery and Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL. She is the recipient of grants and awards, including a Richard Driehaus/Artadia Emerging Artist Award, Illinois Arts Council Artist Grants, and MacDowell Colony Artist Fellowships, and was recently nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Sculptors and Painters. Recent exhibitions include Satellite Gallery at the University of Texas, San Antonio, TX; Cuchifritos Gallery; and ABC No Rio, New York, NY. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, please visit her website. |