Machines in the Head

Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This anthology of Anna Kavan's stories draws together a selection of her best writing from across her long career. Stories from across her collections show the range of her style; 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 addiction from Julia and the Bazooka. Her late sci-fi stories will appeal to fans of her last novel Ice. "Five Days to Countdown," first published in Encounter (1968) and later collected in My Soul in China, is pre-occupied with Cold War concerns and the sartorial aesthetics of the 1960s, 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.

Readers will find the extraordinary range of Kavan's work represented in this anthology, from her moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder. She was determined to experiment throughout her writing career and this collection is, by turns, moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, but always distinctive and often unique.

Although Kavan is better known as a writer than an artist, she painted throughout her life; several of her distinctive paintings will be included in this collection to illustrate her stories.