Gladman, Renee: Event Factory

Event Factory by Renee Gladman (Dorothy a Publishing Project, paperback)

Publication Date: November 1, 2010

Publisher Marketing: Fiction. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. A "linguist-traveler" arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city's erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening. EVENT FACTORY is the first in a trilogy of novels Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign "other" place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

"There are passages in EVENT FACTORY which are furiously beautiful. The evening air is 'tender'; the light is 'yellow'; the morning is a 'greener yellow at the start of the day but every moment growing golden.' Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. And while it's probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman's project, it must be said that EVENT FACTORY, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. It makes great, unpredictable company."—Adam Novy

"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. In EVENT FACTORY the details of her dream gleam specifically yet they bob on the surface of a deeper wider abyss we all might be becoming engulfed in. It has the strange glamour of Kafka's Amerika, this book, but the narrator, lusty and persuasive, is growing up."—Eileen Myles