Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

Description

This collection of Anna Kavan's short fiction and journalism marks fifty years since her death in 1968. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder- including the previously unpublished story Starting a Career - the writings collected in Machines in the Head offer an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of Kavan's diverse writing talents for her fans. In Machines in the Head readers will encounter: oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and asylum incarceration 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 heroin addiction from Julia and the Bazooka. Her late sci-fi stories will appeal to fans of her last novel Ice, and published here for the first time, her story Starting a Career is a futuristic spy-thriller, whose protagonist sets out to become the world's greatest enigma.

ANNA KAVAN (1901-1968) was a British experimental writer and artist. She is best known for her collections of stories including Asylum Piece (1940), I Am Lazarus (1945) and Julia and the Bazooka (1970) and for her novels including Sleep Has His House (1947) and Ice (1967). During the Second World War she worked as an assistant, critic and contributor for the literary journal Horizon.

`One of the most distinctive of 20th century novelists.' Doris Lessing; `One of the most mysterious of modern writers' / `Few contemporary novelists could match the fierce intensity of her vision' J. G. Ballard