Description: Poetry. Fiction. A true account of a fictional work. Renee Gladman is the author of four previous books, most recently NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. She lives in Jamaica Plain.
Brief description: Renee Gladman lives in Boston, Massachusettes, where she publishes Leon Works, a press for experimental fiction and cross-genre writing. Her books include NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM (Kelsey Street Press, 2007), A PICTURE-FEELING (Roof Books, 2005), THE ACTIVIST (Krupskaya, 2003), JUICE (Kelsey Street Press, 2000), NOT RIGHT NOW (Second Story Books, 1998), and Arlem (Idiom Books, 1996). A novella Event Factory is forthcoming from Dorothy, a publishing project in fall 2010. She teaches at Brown University in the Program for Literary Arts.
Review Quotes: "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
"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 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 "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 pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute." --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