Houses of Ravicka

“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 Since 2010 writer and artist Renee Gladman has placed fantastic and philosophical stories in the invented city-state of Ravicka, a Ruritanian everyplace with its own gestural language, poetic architecture, and inexplicable physics. As Ravicka has grown, so has Gladman’s project, spilling out from her fiction— Event Factory , The Ravickians , and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge —into her nonfiction ( Calamities ) and even visual art ( Prose Architectures ). The result is a project unlike any other in American letters today, a fictional world that spans not only multiple books but different genres, even different art forms. In Houses of Ravicka , the city’s comptroller, author of Regulating the Book of Regulations , seems to have lost a house. It is not where it’s supposed to be, though an invisible house on the far side of town, which corresponds to the missing house, remains appropriately invisible. Inside the invisible house, a nameless Ravickian considers how she came to the life she is living, and investigates the deep history of Ravicka—that mysterious city-country born of Renee Gladman’s philosophical, funny, audacious, extraordinary imagination. — ASIN: 0997366664 | ISBN13: 9780997366662 | ISBN-13: 978-0997366662