Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge - Paperback

by Renee Gladman (Author)

"In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, it's the sentence that is alive and that is also a kind of architecture or landscape." --Amina Cain

"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)

Author Biography

Renee Gladman was born in Atlanta in 1971. She is the author of numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. At the core of her work is a critically acclaimed cycle of novels about the imagined city-state of Ravicka and its inhabitants: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017). A graduate of Vassar College and New College of California, she was recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, as well as grants and residencies from Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2015) and the Lannan Foundation (2017), among other institutions. Gladman makes her home in New England.