Calamities

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP)

Thinking collapses & remerges in this metafictional collection of essays following a writer & artist at work.

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life & mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, & space, gradually demanding a new logic & level of consciousness from the narrator & reader.

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Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, & geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing & architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka & its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), & Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. She is the author of seven works of prose & one collection of poetry. A new novel, Morelia, & a collection of essay-fictions, Calamities, are forthcoming in 2015.

Recent essays & visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs & exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships & artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, & received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.