Scarce with dust jacket
KAVAN, Anna. I am Lazarus. London: Jonathan Cape. 1945.
8vo. Original cream cloth boards with black title lettering to spine; [xi], 146; beige dust jacket with title lettering in blue; foot of spine and adjacent corners of boards discoloured; spine of dust jacket toned with loss to head; unmarked internally; otherwise very good.
First edition, extremely scarce in its delicate fragile war time jacket.
I am Lazarus is a powerful series of short stories not seen in print since this edition in the forties. Anna Kavan's cult title story is accompanied by fourteen others, each portraying sketches of individuals on the precipice of life and inspired by her own experience in an asylum.
Five years prior, Anna Kavan processed her traumatic incarceration at a Swedish clinic following a nervous breakdown in her short story collection Asylum Piece (1940). I am Lazarus operates as a loose sequel as she relays her time in London, working with disturbed soldiers in Blitz-era London at a 'military neurosis centre' in Mill Hill.
Kavan's ability is one of striking talent and more than fifty years after her death, she has lived a considerable revival despite the volatility and tragedy of her own reality often usurping her disconcerting and mesmerising fiction.
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