Sleep Has His House (Peter Owen Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Anna Kavan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2003 | Series: Peter Owen Modern Classic

This is a daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation from 1948. It charts the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in a night-time language""-a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations, suggesting that we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened, or decoded, by contemplation in the dark. In the tradition of de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, and Coleridge, this is a fascinating clinical casebook of Kavan's individual obsessions and the effects of drugs on her imagination. ""A near masterpiece in the imaginative speculations of those whose paradise simultaneously contains their hell.""--The Times.

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About the Author

Anna Kavan was one of the greatest unsung enigmas in 20th-century British literature. Born as Helen Ferguson, who had a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life, she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any English female writer of the last 150 years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd (February 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0720611296
• ISBN-13: 978-0720611298
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #782,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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