KAVAN, Anna. Asylum Piece.

‘A Chronicle of Mental Crack Up’

KAVAN, Anna. Asylum Piece. Garden City: Doubleday & Company. 1946.

8vo. Publisher’s beige cloth, with small green rectangle to boards and green strip to spine, lettered in red to boards and spine, green endpapers, fore edge untrimmed, in the typographic dust-jacket designed by Bill English priced at $2.50 to front flap; pp. [2 (blank)], vi, 312, [2 (blank)]; some wear to edges of jacket with a little loss to spine ends (c. 5 x 20mm to foot), a few light surface marks to cloth, ink stamp of Betty Higley in blue to front flap of jacket and front free endpaper; near fine.

First US edition, first impression of Kavan’s short story collection exploring ‘the shadowy borderline between sanity and insanity’ (jacket).

Asylum Piece, a collection of thirty-four short stories was the first book written in her new authorial guise. Sometimes described as Kafkaesque, Kavan’s often disturbing writing is frequently autobiographical. ‘She wrote in a mirror’, wrote her friend Rhys Davies in a 1970 essay of remembrance. Kavan – who first published under her married name, Helen Ferguson – published six books before Asylum Piece (1946). She had attempted suicide numerous times and had been interred in a clinic. Upon her release, she legally changed her name to her pseudonym, Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her previous novels Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1995). She also bleached her hair, disappeared further into her dystopias, and began composing striking works of experimental fiction.

Asylum Piece is one of the author’s most impressive and disconcerting excavations of madness. Anais Nin, a steadfast admirer of Kavan’s work, noted her ability to render psychological trauma in abrupt, sparse prose, the irrational world becoming disturbingly matter of fact, displaying ‘a classical lucidity while entering irrational worlds’.

SKU: 2122495