Enter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of
mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own
harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her
best short stories.
Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction,
comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories
explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of
her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan's stories
gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career,
including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and
institutionalization 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 addiction from Julia and
the Bazooka (1970). Kavan's turn to science fiction in her final novel,
Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while "Starting a Career,"
about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the
first time.
Kavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are
moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique.
Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview
of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.
