Event Factory

"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

A "linguist-traveler" arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city's erosion, she is beset by this other crisis--an ontological crisis--as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign "other" place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

Author: Renee Gladman
Publisher: Dorothy a Publishing Project
Published: 11/01/2010
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 6.90h x 5.50w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780984469307


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/13/2010

About the Author
Gladman, Renee: - 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 seven works of prose--including ANA PATOVA CROSSES A BRIDGE (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2013), THE RAVICKIANS (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2011), EVENT FACTORY (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2010), NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM (Kelsey Street Press, 2007), THE ACTIVIST (Krupskaya, 2003), and JUICE (Kelsey Street Press, 2000)--and one collection of poetry, A PICTURE-FEELING (Roof Books, 2005). 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.