Houses of Ravicka

Renee Gladman

ISBN 10: 0997366664 / ISBN 13: 9780997366662

Published by New York Review Books, US, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # LU-9780997366662

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Houses of Ravicka
• Publisher: New York Review Books, US
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0997366664
• ISBN 13: 9780997366662
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 170 grams

About this title

Synopsis

“More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman’s achievement ranks alongside many of Borges’ in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact.” —Jeff VanderMeer

Since 2010 writer and artist Renee Gladman has placed fantastic and philosophical stories in the invented city-state of Ravicka, a Ruritanian everyplace with its own gestural language, poetic architecture, and inexplicable physics. As Ravicka has grown, so has Gladman's project, spilling out from her fiction—Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge—into her nonfiction (Calamities) and even visual art (Prose Architectures). The result is a project unlike any other in American letters today, a fictional world that spans not only multiple books but different genres, even different art forms.

In Houses of Ravicka, the city's comptroller, author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, seems to have lost a house. It is not where it's supposed to be, though an invisible house on the far side of town, which corresponds to the missing house, remains appropriately invisible. Inside the invisible house, a nameless Ravickian considers how she came to the life she is living, and investigates the deep history of Ravicka—that mysterious city-country born of Renee Gladman's philosophical, funny, audacious, extraordinary imagination.

About the Author

Renee Gladman was born in Atlanta in 1971. She is the author of numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. At the core of her work is a critically acclaimed cycle of novels about the imagined city-state of Ravicka and its inhabitants: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017). A graduate of Vassar College and New College of California, she was recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, as well as grants and residencies from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2015) and the Lannan Foundation (2017), among other institutions. Gladman makes her home in New England.