A 2014-15 fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and a 2017 Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in Marfa, TX, she lives and makes work in New England. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's,BOMB magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians-Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), andHouses of Ravicka (2017)-as well as the recently released Prose Architectures, her first monograph of drawings, and Calamities, a collection of linked auto-essays on the intersections of writing, drawing, and community, which won the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Non-Fiction. (Dec.Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. A novel set inside a poem, the work grasps at the heart of an imaginary people, deftly illustrating their inner life and looming stagnation in little more than 150 pages. Renee Gladman's 'Event Factory' If epic is a story of the community for the community, then Event Factory asks the contemporary reader to consider: How does one tell the tale of the community now In the place of a sure narrative about a place and its people, Renee Gladman’s text presents ambiguities palpable, permeating, and resonant. The book starts off with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett’s posthumous narrative The Calmative, which might offer a clue where Renee Gladman is coming from.

What sounds conceptually overweighted in summary isn’t in the book Gladman’s talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication. It’s hard to know what to make of Event Factory, a short novel that’s the first offering from Danielle Dutton’s Dororthy, a publishing project. This is merely prelude to the “path of words” Limici intends to cut through the endangered city with poems. But the simple act of strolling puts Amini in mind of the immortal work, I Thought of Architecture, written by Amini’s greatest love. Against a backdrop of creeping insularity and decay, the novelist Luswage Amini sets out to attend a reading by the great Zàoter Limici, moving through ghostly penthouses and strange shadows cast by the unfamiliar dialects of strangers. Gladman welcomes us back to the city-state of Ravika, the site of her 2010 novel, The Event Factory, where paved roads are stories and the lives of buildings and their inhabitants are so closely entwined that “the despair” causing the city’s districts to erode also endangers the very language of its poets and writers, making translation impossible.

Event Factory by Renee Gladman