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.
Read an interview with Gladman here.
“Allied with the fiction of Italo Calvino, Doris Lessing, and others, The Ravickians is entertaining, thoughtful, and a quick read. As with everything published by the Dorothy Project, it’s also a lovely little book to hold in your hand.” jeff vandermeer, omnivoracious
“Gladman’s talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication. A novel set inside a poem, the work grasps at the heart of an imaginary people, deftly illustrating their inner life and looming stagnation in little more than 150 pages.” publishers weekly
“More than a novel, The Ravickians is a kind of curated environment, one built of the culture, language, and architecture of its people, but one that recognizes as well that the reader’s perspective need not be omniscient, that the reader’s point of view can be directed, that the reader can be pulled into the fictive space and made to occupy the stage as an absence or an extra.” tom de beauchamp, the collagist
COVER ART: 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.
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