Author: Anna Kavan Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers ISBN: 0720617138 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
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.
Author: Jonathan Coe Publisher: Penguin Group ISBN: 9780241967744 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Set in a private clinic that treats sleep disorders Jonathan Coe's novel, told in 6 sections, relates to wakefulness, drowsiness and the 4 stages of sleep. In the novel he explores 'lost' movies and forgotten dreams.
Author: Jonathan Coe Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525434348 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
A dream of a novel." --Erica Wagner, The Times (London) Following The Winshaw Legacy--Coe's ecstatically reviewed American debut, winner of the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize in England and France's coveted Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger--comes this beguiling, eccentric entertainment. Ashdown--a vast clifftop manor on the English coast--was once a university residence, where a group of students met briefly before going their separate ways. Twelve years later, it has been transformed into a clinic for sleep disorders, and a series of strange coincidences and ostensible synchronicities draws the same group of people together once again, each of them in different ways plagued by sleep. Sarah is narcoleptic, and her inability to distinguish between dreams and waking reality gives rise to a great many misunderstandings--one of which is to change Robert's life forever, as he persists for years (and then some) in his attempt to win her love. For Terry, a disillusioned film critic whose career has been derailed by Sarah's affliction, sleep is merely a memory, for his insomnia is complete and he can only yearn for the tantalizing dreams he enjoyed in youth. And for the increasingly deranged Dr. Dudden, who has made the subject the focus of his medical practice, sleep is nothing less than a global disease. With panache worthy of Nabokov, and with the heart to match his sophistication, Jonathan Coe has written a breathtakingly original comedy about the powers we acquire--and those we relinquish--when we fall asleep, or fall in love. "This is a remarkable book, most impressive for its subtle narrative patterning, like a dapple of light and shade, allowing us to indulge the illusion of understanding its characters, until, all at once, the darkness, the isolation and the mystery return. Perhaps most strange of all, for a novel about insomniacs, The House of Sleep is a wonderful bedtime read." --David Nokes, Sunday Times
Author: NA NA Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349622397 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
Lawrence Driscoll's fresh examination of the meaning of drugs from the Victorians to the present asks us to listen to historical and current voices whose positions on drugs are at variance with our "truths." Driscoll draws on the work of figures as diverse as William Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, Conan Doyle, and Anna Kavan to shed light on different or silenced ways of talking about drugs and to offer us a historical counter-memory. The result of his work is to unsettle and disturb the familiar parameters that frame our discussion of drugs, revealing that others are available: positions which expose our own constructions as surprisingly limited.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004519882 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
This volume calls for a Narratology of Diversity by investigating narratives of non-normative bodies and minds. It explores mental health representations in literature, including neurodiversity, the body-mind nexus, and embodied non-normativities, therein emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse psychological conditions as represented in narratives. The contributions include perspectives from a wide variety of scholars of European, North American, and comparative literature and culture. While post-classical narratology has evolved through phases of diversification and consolidation, this volume represents innovation in understanding narrative development to embrace new areas of social awareness, including gendered narratologies (specifically feminist and queer narratologies) and post-colonial criticism, paving the way for a more inclusive narratology.
Author: Andrew Radford Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030727661 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.
Author: Anna Kavan Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0525503773 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem "One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future . . . A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real." -The New Yorker In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl” with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction—all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow. Kavan’s 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Miéville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics. "One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision." —J.G. Ballard “There is nothing else like it.” —Doris Lessing For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author: Lodewijk Brunt Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH ISBN: 3865961738 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
"Investigates the sleep patterns of babies and businessmen, of mothers and daughters, of the industrious and the idle. Read how mighty knights and zealous preachers value sleep, what medicine men and modern scholars think of it. Explore what disturbs lovers' sleep and how refugees ensure their restful slumber" - back cover.
Author: Anna Kavan
Author: Jonathan Coe
Author: Jonathan Coe
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Author: Andrew Radford
Author: Anna Kavan
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Author: Lodewijk Brunt
Author: William Lawson