Anna Kavan Books

A novel about a young girl, rejected by her mother, whose life is constantly betrayed and consequently the girl goes mad.

A classic later novel by Anna Kavan.   A largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, this daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation chronicles the subject's gradual withdrawal from the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in what is defined as "nighttime language"—a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations. The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark. Revealing that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly emphasize, this startling discovery illustrates how these nighttime illuminations reveal the narrator's joy for the living world.

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.

In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as "the warden" search for an elusive girl in a frozen, post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere: great walls of ice overrun the world in this hallucinatory quest-novel. Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

This thrilling account depicts the tale of the first American expedition to summit Mount Everest. Led by Houston, it was also the first expedition to utilize bottled oxygen to reach the highest peak. Anna Kavan writes with the same excitement and tense moments as if the reader were actually present on the treacherous climb.

Das zentrale Thema dieses Romans ist das Scheitern einer Ehe mit einem Mann, der trinkt und als Zeitvertreib mit einem Tennisschläger Ratten erschlägt.