Dorothy, a publishing project

Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel. TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.

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Read an excerpt from the opening pages of TOAF at LARB.

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“Incredibly, Gladman pulls off a story about a failed piece of writing that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Instead, it’s packed with wonderfully strange ideas (while writing After That, Gladman wondered if she was existing in the realm of fiction), and it builds to a clarifying conclusion about the relief of letting a project go. This is a marvel.” Publishers Weekly

“TOAF is a slim little volume, but its pages swallow the world whole. If My Lesbian Novel is a book about a book coming into being, TOAF is a book about a book that never came to be. Gladman’s books confront endings like lunar cycles, rebirth inherent on their face.” Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

“Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel I’m watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubik’s Cube, except the goal isn’t to solve it but to present every possible arrangement.” Ben Purkert, The Rumpus

“Gladman manages to achieve an impossible balance between the intellectual rigor of an academic, the linguistic sensibility of a poet, and the probing logical fantasy of a visual artist.” Trevor Ketner, Kenyon Review

“Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes.” Eileen Myles

“Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute.” Publishers Weekly

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