Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

by Anna Kavan

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 From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder – including the previously unpublished story ‘Starting a Career’ – the writings collected in Machines in the Head offer an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of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. Her journalism, giving insight into her radical politics and her thoughts on writing and writers, is reproduced in full.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction, Classics, Literature, British Literature, Collections

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2019

About the author

Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.

Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.

Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.

Reviews

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Machines in the Head provides you with a good smattering of Anna Kavan’s short stories, which are different and curious in a variety of ways. Many of them, including the story “Starting a Career” (published for the first time in this collection), read as if they are only excerpts, sometimes at the beginning and sometimes in the middle, of longer stories. Others, like “Our City,” are impressionistic fragments, with that work in particular reminded me of Kafka’s The Trial. Kavan’s stories tend to feature certain recurring totems, like psych wards, the wind, apocalypses (whether in ice or in blood and violence), addiction, and suppressed trauma. Knowing a small bit about Kavan’s history, as well as her other literary output, the presence of some of these totems is not at all surprising.

I largely prefer Kavan’s novels to her short stories. The brief tales in Machines in the Head tend to be more interesting than they are enjoyable, filled with unique strangeness, though most didn’t fully satisfy. Many struck me as Kavan developing the themes and writing skills that would later come together in her final novel, and my personal favorite of her works, Ice. However, I don’t want you to read this review and think there aren’t any gems here: Julia and the Bazooka is a five-star story which I would highly recommend. Overall, though, I’d give this collection a 3/5. It’s a good collection to pick up if you want to explore Kavan’s short stories, I just don’t believe that’s the strongest part of her body of work.

[Erica]

reminiscent of clarice lispector, armonia somers, amparo davila and the like, but more languid and unsentimental. i liked it and look forward to reading ice. appropriate reading for a loopy and unfocused state of being

[Chris Via]

Video review: ‪https://youtu.be/355qdvpYDfU

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uncompromisingly inscrutable vignettes that range from the weird to the fucking weird. I was frequently frustrated but was really into the apocalyptic visions.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I approve of this collection. The forward is respectful and the stories are thoughtfully arranged. This edition doesn’t include her art or journalism. It does, however, include the short story that was previously unpublished. I don’t know enough about the publishing world to explain that.

I recommend this as a companion piece, not an introduction, to her work.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Anna Kavan's Ice in 2018 and found it to be a surreal, haunting piece of work that explored how agency is stripped away from women in virtually all things. The short novel slips in and out of time, portrays a end-of-times nightmare world, and features a woman in distress and in pursuit.

Fast forward to Machines in the Head, an anthology published by the illustrious NYRB in 2019 and I can't help feel a little disappointed. Well, disappointed isn't the right word. But much of Kavan's work, at least until the later stage of her career, feels a little one-note. Themes and motifs recur without much expansion or deeper exploration. Most of the earlier stories in this collection are clearly autobiographically inspired, often around a protagonist who is paranoid, lonely, and being repressed by the greater system around them--which is easily mapped onto Kavan's experience being treated in a psychiatric hospital for mental illness.

Later stories in the collection, especially those from Julia and the Bazooka are much more interesting, deeply dark and paint those apocalyptic visions harkening back to some of the strongest moments in Ice. It seems Kavan's attention shifts slightly from mental illness in general to drug addiction, which again, maps pretty much 1:1 with her life and heroin use.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Kavan is that after leaving the mental hospital, adopted one of her fictional characters' name as her own. It was a reset for her after leaving the place, but also a wild turn as she became her fictions. Kavan's life maps on her to fictions like her fiction maps onto her life, blurring the lines of distinction between real and myth. I can't say reading this anthology makes me want to dig deeper to read the individual collections, but Kavan's voice, style and thematic focus are so unique to her vision of storytelling that to experience it is really something special.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I can't keep on all my life writing in the same way… The world now is quite different and so is my life in it. One reacts to the environment and atmosphere one lives in, one absorbs outside influences, and my writing changes with the conditions outside." (15)

I was under the mistaken impression that Machines in the Head would be a collection of new writings by Anna Kavan. It turns out that only one short story—Starting a Career—was previously unpublished, the other stories being selected from the following collections: Asylum Piece (1940), I Am Lazarus (1945), A Bright Green Field (1957), and Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Aside from the 'new' story, this anthology includes pictures of Kavan's paintings (in color, quite beautiful) and a number of journalistic pieces, which were fairly interesting.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is what people who don’t read books think that all literature will be like: the writer is a heroin addict, the characters are all cripplingly depressed, and the descriptions feel like acid trips.
Read this if you want to convince yourself that you’re not actually depressed, it’s all those fricking normies who have the problem for somehow daring to be happy.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed."

More like 3.5 stars.
I quite liked about half of these dark little stories and if they're indicative of the troubled Kavan's larger style I would gladly read more. The other half are so-and-so and differ so much from the outstanding selections that I wonder why the editor would bother slapping them all together.
But who cares about those? It's the 5-star caliber stories we care about, and those out-Kafka even Kafka. In fact, they're better than Kafka and more Kafkaesque. Man, I hate that word, but it's a nice time-saver if I understand its connotations correctly.
Kavan, who was a drug addict, world traveler, and all-around disturbed individual, was, as all those combinations often make, an incredible stylist. Her stories are short, succinct, and grim. She packs a lot of horror and darkness into 3-4 pages. People are accused of uncertain crimes by distant, uncertain authorities. Unknown enemies torment narrators. Birds assault children. Despots summon turncoats. Fog. Student riots and secret helicopters. Fog. Madness. Et cetera.
Great stuff, I look forward to reading Kavan's sci-fi novel Ice soon, too!

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, paranoid collection of cockeyed stories.

[Damon Reyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Ice so much that I couldn't resist picking this up immediately after finishing it. Some of the stories in this collection were written as early as the 1930s, a few decades before Ice was published in 1967, and some of the later stories were published posthumously after her death in the following year, so you get a very good sense of her evolution by reading this. The first collection of stories in here, Asylum Piece, which was (surprise!) written about her time in a psychiatric ward, holds some of her most raw and emotive pieces. By this point she was already a fairly experienced writer, having published a few works under the name Helen Ferguson, and she was extremely clever with her portrayal of her mental illness as this sort of legal sentencing—a condemnation with no fair trial; the shadow of a gavel poised permanently above her head. The way she instills this larger-than-life and oppressive sense of doom in her words is like nothing I've ever experienced from another writer. The way she manages to spark the imagination despite her gloom is even more impressive.

According to the foreword by Victoria Walker, Kavan's writing had been criticized for being too "self-obsessed," but I see this as nothing but an absolute boon to her writing. Kavan wrote about what she knew best, and as a woman suffering from depression and addiction, she was no doubt a ruthless analyzer of the self and of society, and her ability to create compelling worlds out of dark and complex emotions was uncanny. I actually found the stories in I Am Lazarus, where Kavan steps outside of herself to write these stories of traumatized male soldiers during WW2, to be some of her weakest pieces (by only a small margin, mind you). God bless her for trying to empathize with others, but these stories possibly dragged the most out of any of the others and lacked the same kind of rich inner world that makes some of her more autobiographical stories so compelling (although "Gannets"—a two-and-a-half-page story about some sacrificial children and eye-gouging birds that ends with a vitriolic musing about the atrocity of life and no divine being's ability to drive it out—was fucking awesome.)

Once we get to the three-story collection of A Bright Green Field (pub. 1958), we start to see Kavan's more abstract and experimental stylings begin to really flourish; these stories were all very dark, vivid, and mysterious. "All Saints" in particular was a pretty wild free verse poem that I loved. A lot of the remaining stories have much to do with Kavan's experience with heroin addiction and societal withdrawal, but once again, just like with her depression, she never actually calls the thing by its name, and instead utilizes these wildly creative metaphors to transform her personal struggles into hypnotic pieces of dark fiction.

Anna Kavan's style is so iconic and impossible to replicate because it came from such a deeply genuine place inside herself, and despite her best efforts to transform her feelings into luminescent green fields, sentient octopus cities, and machines in the head, she also comes across as so transparently honest in these texts that it's impossible to not feel sorrow right alongside her as you read. If you read and enjoyed Ice, this is without a doubt worth just as much of your time.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several evolutions in style, including a return to origin. Stories of addiction and psychological incarceration dressed in a wide range of style. Sure there’s some Kafka via Calvino evoking Renee Gladman but there’s also something distinctly South American about the last couple stories.

[Sam Andrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Where she was there was only nothing.”

4.5

At first Kavan’s writing style was super disorienting especially the stories about ww1 but I really enjoyed a lot of them especially asylum piece ii, ice storm, a visit, and my fave julia and the bazooka - usually the exploding time narrative structure throws me off but it really worked for me in that one. In such a short amount of pages I really understood the tragedy of Julia’s (and kavan bc let’s be real all these heroin stories are pseudo autobiographical) entire life and I think that’s definitely a trademark of excellent writing skill.

Makes me want to go back and finally finish that clarisse lispector book …. TBD

[Kyle Crawley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I wasn't too impressed with Kavan's writing or stories. In most, there loomed a palpable and persistent paranoia or sense of persecution: maybe that's what heroin does to you, I wouldn't know...

That being said, the story 'Julia and the Bazooka' although based on 'Julia's' relationship to her syringe, is the one story in this collection from which I took some real joy. It has an almost fantastical, oneiric, magical realist-type vibe and I'd like to find out if Kavan has writing more like this because, if so, I'd definitely read it.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

tone is villainously british — perhaps too much for my taste. owes more to Kafka than most do. title story is good but like most of the premises here there is little care for conceptual clarity. we get some vague gestures towards "ideas" as such, but this neglects to account for the most dangerous idea of them all: the belief that you actually had one.

[August Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up the NYRB edition of this with no knowledge about Anna Kavan or her work. Happily, I have yet to be disappointed by NYRB! Kavan's writing is highly experimental and uniquely cohered to her turbulent personal life, which included a lifetime struggle with heroin addiction and multiple stints in institutions for mental health issues. A sensibility of gloom and confusion pervades her writing, along with a deep skepticism of systems and an ominous feeling of dread. Her fiction seems to mirror her life and vice versa. Even her name itself began as a fiction; Anna Kavan was a character in one of her stories until she took the name herself (Helen Ferguson was her given name). I was sold by the opening lines of the opening story, which are stop-in-your-tracks good: "In the low-lying streets near the river where I live there is fog all through the winter. When I go to bed at night it is so cold that the pillow freezes my cheek. For a long time I have been lonely, cold and miserable."

Machines in the Head covers a wide breadth of Kavan's career and includes stories from collections originally published between 1940 and 1975. In that way, this selection shows remarkable growth for Kavan as a writer. The early stories from Asylum Piece (1940) and I am Lazarus (1945) are dark and opaque, sketched somewhat roughly. The Kafka comparisons are unavoidable in these stories about psychological terror and being condemned by systems neither seen nor understood. I happened to read The Trial just before this and was struck by some of the similarities (some characters even go by just a letter for a name, like Kafka's enduring K). "Airing a Grievance," for example, covers a visit to a legal advisor as the protagonist labors to get help navigating an indictment that is never made clear while the motivations of the advisor himself become dubious. Kavan closes out this story by lamenting, "Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence," (p 18).

Later stories from A Bright Green Field (1958) and Julia and the Bazooka (1970) find Kavan's prose refined and comfortable with more experimental and surrealist writing. Kavan's knack for fresh descriptions of the environment is heightened here, too. She can write evocatively about a harsh city skyline ("There is even a sort of resemblance between the serrated blade as it must appear shearing down on its prey," [p. 74]) and an overly-radiant meadow ("Such effulgent lustre is unsuited to its humble place in the natural order and shows that in this meadow the grass has risen above itself - grown arrogant, aggressive, too full of strength," [p 98]). The meadow's grass, it turns out, is kept at bay with a draconian mowing contraption that frequently maims or kills the town's poor who are strapped into it.

[Justine Kaufmann]

Anna Kavan’s Machines in the Head is a collection of short stories, but reading through them, it feels more like a series of shifting nightmares. They are often brief, bizarre, full of paranoia, loneliness, and doom, from within and without while blurring these lines. I seem to always use the word shifting to describe Kavan’s work (especially in her novel Ice), because I never feel like I’m on solid ground while reading her, the ground beneath me is constantly giving way to other realities.

It is difficult to not think of Kafka when reading these stories (even Ingeborg Bachmann and Ann Quin), and Kavan’s work is probably one of the most deserving of this comparison to Kafka, but Kavan is more claustrophobic and modern, bureaucratic institutions being replaced by the mental institute and hospital.

These stories were interesting for seeing Kavan’s range and progression as an author, but Ice still stands out as one of my favorite reading experiences in recent years.

Quotes:
‘I began to wonder, as I have wondered ever since, whether the good opinion of anybody in the whole world is worth all that I have had to suffer and must still go on suffering—for how long; oh, for how long?’

‘The fog was everywhere; it was inside my head.’
‘My present world is reduced to their remembered faces, which have gone for ever, which get further and further away. I don’t feel alive any more. I see nothing at all of the outside world. There are no more oceans or mountains for me.

I don’t look up now. I always try not to look at the stars. I can’t bear to see them, because the stars remind me of loving and of being loved.’

[Candice · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is another book I stopped reading. She's a favorite author of some of my favorite authors, but I couldn't take her. To whit:

"The bald, excrescent shelter which I'm passing has a curious morbid look, like some kind of tumor that has stopped being painful and hardened into a static, permanent lump. It reminds me of one of those chronic swellings you sometimes see on a person's neck which has been there for so long that no one but a stranger notices it any more. The entrance to the shelter is screened with wire netting I look through. The inside of the place is unclean."

According to the jacket this is the work of a "fearless an dazzling literary explorer," but the ghoulishness was bringing me down, man!!

[Georgia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anna Kavan’s Collection of stories “Machines in the Head” are beautifully descriptive, metaphorically thick and precisely portraying Kavan’s history through her words.
I personally struggled understanding some of the motifs and honestly just don’t think I had the brain power to enter into her world this time. Hopefully I’ll come back to her works at a later date when I feel more capable.


🌟Face of My People
A Bright Green Field
The Old Address
Fog
Julia and the Bazooka
The Case of Ben Williams


“Why am I locked in this nightmare of violence, isolation and cruelty? Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is. I live alone in my mind, and alone I'm being crushed to suffocation, immured by the walls I have made. It's unbearable. I can't possibly live in this terrible, hideous, revolting creation of mine.”

[Jake Nap · Rating 5 out of 5]

My goat, I love Anna Kavan. Ice is perhaps my favorite novel and this collection only heightened my love for her writing and that novel. The reoccurring coldness and motifs of ice, snow and extreme weather are such a strong metaphor for her life. Learning more about her biography only strengthens the power of the short stories. Her work is autobiographical at times and knowing about her history with abusive men and her lifelong affair with heroin inform a lot of the stories here. She writes like a perfect mixture of Kafka and Woolf which is so in my q zone. I love Kavan to death, I just bought a bundle of books off of eBay of hers that I’m desperately looking forward to reading.

[Robin Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna Kavan’s writing feels like a fever dream, both strange and haunting. I read Ice (a new favorite of mine) earlier this year and that was my introduction to Kavan. I truly enjoyed this, however I wish some of these short stories were longer. The stories are
Both haunting and melancholic, and just feel a bit off as if you don’t know what is real or what is in the narrators head. Which is all the more tragic because of Kavans troubled life and tragic death. I will definitely recommend this to anyone who read Ice and really liked it.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.5/10
Usually I don't write reviews for books, however this book seemed deserving of one. I wanted to love this book as I feel that Kavan's style of prose can be great at times. Many of the earliest stories feel like a fever dream and remind me of Kafka's work. However, these stories are left behind quickly and the later stories feel vapid with surface-level commentary. This collection had an amazing potential that was sadly squashed out for what is ultimately a slightly better than average short story collection.

Top three stories:
Face of my People
A Bright Green Field
The Old Adress

[manasa k · Rating 4 out of 5]

anna kavan quickly rising to the top of a list of authors who i love and who know how to twist together an incredible sentence. this is somewhere in between diaristic and speculative almost sci-fi - these stories feel like they belong within the same larger narrative which is either kavan’s actual experience with substances or the worlds of technological desolation in her novels. captures acute loneliness mixed with paranoia and dread !

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get why people find her writing interesting, but I found this a slog to get through, and to be honest I abandoned several of the short stories and skipped to the next ones. The prose can be really hallucinatory, which I enjoyed, but her writing is also very repetitive. It's not bad. It's just not something I personally did not enjoy.

[Alexander Kodak · Rating 2 out of 5]

This woman is just depressed, and her writing is just her depression and anxiety. Her lack of character development was detailed in the intro as intentional…well it felt intentionally bad.

Also because it’s a collection of her short stories, unlike another book of short stories I’ve read which shared motifs and themes across the book, this was JUST a collection of her stories, which made it extremely unexciting.

Not bad just boring.

[Lordes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange and intricate short stories, not sure whats going on most of the time but they are visually enticing.

[⚔️regina｡⋆୨୧˚]

sophie thatcher posted it so i must readdd.

[Blackout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed these bleak worlds

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderful collection of stories was probably one of those much awaited releases this year from NYRB. This, along with Unwitting Street are probably the two highlights of my readings from NYRB classics this year. I had no knowledge of Anna Kavan other than that she was a writer in the style of Leonora Carrington or Jean Rhys. But after reading this, my first exposure to her, she appears an amalgamation of much more. There are elements of Clarice Lispector and Sivina Ocampo in her writings. There is an all pervading sense of the bizarre and unreal that exists in common everyday circumstances. A powerful sense of desolation and gloom embraces us in her everyday stories that verge on uncanny reality. Take for example one of the standout stories in this collection 'A Visit' from her 1970 collection Julia and the Bazooka. It depicts one of the most unrealistic encounters in fiction as it describes in poetic detail the nightime rendezvous between a lonely woman living in a coastal village and a full grown leopard!!! It is not evident from the story whether the two are lovers (this queer circumstance having dealt with in sensuous and precise detail by that great Frenchman Balzac in his famous story 'A Passion in the Desert'). The woman finds the wild cat to be a noble animal possessing an intelligent head,

In this particular specimen I noticed something singularly human about the formation of the skull, which was domed rather than flattened, as is generally the case with the big cats, suggesting the possibility of superior brain development inside.

To make it even more unrealistic and unpalatable to the senses is the way how the woman feels attracted to the wild cat for the first time,

While I observed him, I was all the time breathing his natural odour, a wild primeval smell of sunshine, freedom, moon and crushed leaves, combined with the cool freshness of the spotted hide, still damp with the midnight moisture of jungle plants. I found this non-human scent, surrounding him like an aura of strangeness, peculiarly attractive and stimulating.

The wild cat leaves the woman's place the next morning and stays with her for a while only to leave her all of a sudden. She waits for it to come back but in vain. It is a story of her desolation and intense mental anguish as she hopes against hope as she longs for it to return. But one day on the coast she observes a handsome young man arriving in a ship and immediately feels a connection between him and the big cat,

....I saw, out to sea, a young man coming towards the land, standing upright on the crest of a huge breaker, his red cloak blowing out in the wind, and a string of pelicans solemnly flapping in line behind him. It was so odd to see this stranger with his weird escort, approaching alone from the ocean on which no ships ever sailed, that my thoughts immediately connected him with the leopard: there must be some contact between them; perhaps he was bringing me news...

Then another day the sight of a pelican drew connections in her with it and the wild cat and the young man, and she drew hope and strength from it that she would meet the leopard again. A few days later at the coast she saw both the leopard and the young man drawing nearer to the coast only to disappear with the sudden rush of giant rolling wave,

....Their exploding roar deafened me, I was half blinded by the salt spray; the whole beach was a swirling, glittering dazzle in which I lost sight of the two sea-borne shapes. And when my eyes brought them back into focus, they had changed direction, turned from the land and were already a long way off, receding fast, diminishing every second, reduced to vanishing point by the hard, blinding brilliance of sun and waves.

She never sees or hears again of them, and goes back to her desolate and monotonous life. The overpowering feeling of uncanny semblance and desolation the story left inside me will haunt me for a long while. It is all about the bizarre and unreal within everyday reality; finding the strange in the montonous.

I will be eagerly on the lookout to read more of Anna Kavan in the future. An exciting intro to a newly discovered author.

[Trevor Arrowood · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wild little collection of stories. I really feel like the first 70% of these stories were really good, but the last 30% lost some sort of touch and power that the other stories carried.
Kavan herself stated that she always wanted to change her style, and I could clearly see that throughout this varied collection that spans ~30 years of her writing.
The themes of paranoia in her earlier writing were Pynchon-esque and added an interesting depth to her characters.