Machines in the Head

This collection of Anna Kavan's short fiction and journalism marks fifty years since her death in 1968. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder– including the previously unpublished story Starting a Career – the writings collected in Machines in the Head offer an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of Kavan's diverse writing talents for her fans.

In Machines in the Head readers will encounter: oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and asylum incarceration from Asylum Piece (1940); moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945); fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958); and stories of heroin addiction from Julia and the Bazooka. Her late sci-fi stories will appeal to fans of her last novel Ice, and published here for the first time, her story Starting a Career is a futuristic spy-thriller, whose protagonist sets out to become the world's greatest enigma.