To After That (TOAF)

by Renee Gladman, Danielle Dutton (Introduction)

Overview

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.

Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.

TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948980258
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 6.97(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy—Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Danielle Dutton is a cofounder of Dorothy, a publishing project and the author of several books, including Attempts at a Life, SPRAWL, Margaret the First, and most recently, A Picture Held Us Captive. A new collection of her prose, Prairies, Dresses, Art, Other, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

Editorial Reviews

Incredibly, Gladman pulls off a story about a failed piece of writing that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Instead, it’s packed with wonderfully strange ideas (while writing After That, Gladman wondered if she was existing in the realm of fiction), and it builds to a clarifying conclusion about the relief of letting a project go. This is a marvel.” —Publishers Weekly

“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.” —Eileen Myles

“Gladman manages to achieve an impossible balance between the intellectual rigor of an academic, the linguistic sensibility of a poet, and the probing logical fantasy of a visual artist.” —Trevor Ketner, Kenyon Review

“Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel I’m watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubik’s Cube, except the goal isn’t to solve it but to present every possible arrangement.” —Ben Purkert, The Rumpus

“Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute.” —Publishers Weekly

"TOAF is a slim little volume, but its pages swallow the world whole. If My Lesbian Novel is a book about a book coming into being, TOAF is a book about a book that never came to be. Gladman’s books confront endings like lunar cycles, rebirth inherent on their face.” —Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

From the Publisher