Dorothy, a publishing project

“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman’s magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” Lyn Hejinian

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Read a review of Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge in The Collagist, or reviews of all three Ravicka books at Music & Literature and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Read an excerpt of Ana Patova in The Brooklyn Rail. And check out this conversation between Renee and Amina Cain at BOMBlog.

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“Gladman is the most consistently daring U.S. writer.” Evan Lavender-Smith

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Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is part of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series. The other three books in the series are also available from Dorothy, a publishing project: Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Houses of Ravicka.

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