RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...showcases Kavan at her most harrowing and innovative. She was one of the first British late modernists to fuse seemingly incompatible narrative modes — autobiography and speculative fiction — and balance the personal, even the confessional, with sci-fi, fabulism, and the weird ... The border between reality and fantasy is troubled, wavering. Fog and darkness dominate the external and internal landscapes ... These are sentences that might be committed to a diary or rehearsed in one’s head while lying alone in a dark room. They carry such charge because they exist in a context of stark contrast. This alchemical maneuver, which combines the fantastic and the intensely personal, is Kavan’s calling card ... Machines in the Head displays Kavan at her most experimental, personal, and disquieting. Very few writers convey the pain of solitude and the anxieties of solipsism so viscerally, so nakedly.
