Gladman, Renee: Houses of Ravicka

Houses of Ravicka by Renee Gladman (Dorothy a Publishing Project, paperback)

Publication Date: November 1, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Fiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Ravicka's comptroller, author of "Regulating the Book of Regulations," seems to have lost a house. It is not where it's supposed to be, though an invisible house on the far side of town, which corresponds to the missing house, remains appropriately invisible. Inside the invisible house, a nameless Ravickian considers how she came to the life she is living, and investigates the deep history of Ravicka—that mysterious city-country born of Renee Gladman's philosophical, funny, audacious, extraordinary imagination.

"Gladman inverts 1984 in her inventive fourth novel"—Publisher's Weekly

"The Ravikian novels exalt the primacy of language to further imaginative possibility, which dominant and oppressive regimes would shut down. Gladman's writing cleaves to the luminous. It slips through the gaps in our thinking to pluralise, queer, subvert, and mobilise. These books are strange but, through a bright and deft poetic obliquity, they shine an incomparable light onto our contemporary moment."—The White Review

"HOUSES OF RAVICKA is certainly the most plot-heavy of the Ravicka series, with a central problem that never truly gets resolved, but its joy, as with the previous novels, lives in Gladman's whimsical approach to crafting sentences and situations that are at once absurd and illuminating."—The Village Voice