This is writing...where, as in a dreamscape, the line between experience and imagination is irrevocably blurred ... a remarkable collection, composed of narratives so relentlessly self-eviscerating that to read them feels like peeling off your skin. That’s because Kavan is not especially compelled by the banalities of conventional fiction. Many of her stories are only incrementally plotted, unfolding for the most part in a kind of never-ending present tense ... What Kavan is evoking is a complicity, a terrain in which her characters—often nameless, caught up in existential crisis, existential desolation—express, in precise and specific detail, the parameters of their distress ... their desolation is as concrete as it gets. This may be the most striking aspect of Kavan’s fiction, the precision with which she recreates despair. The key is her language, which is utterly without illusion ... Here we see the conundrum of Kavan’s fiction: living is unbearable, but so too is its alternative. The only consolation must come from the inside—the dreamlife, as it were. And yet, what happens when the dreamlife is defined by nightmare, as it is in Kavan’s work? ... What she, like Kafka, is describing is the experience of having nowhere to turn.

...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.

Kavan’s narrators often experience social persecution or emotional isolation in climatic terms—fog and ice and other forces threaten destruction—making that time of world war, mass displacement, and imminent nuclear winter feel intimately connected to our own, in which looming environmental catastrophe provides an ever-available metaphor for societal and psychological ills. Meanwhile the increasingly anomic autonomy of Kavan’s stories only enhances their precision as reflections of the twentieth century, with its bomb shelters and mental institutions, its traumatized soldiers and alienated workers, its totalitarian bureaucrats and rioting students ... In Kavan, sardonic, absurdist humor shoots through the dark ... Kavan’s work, read in this form, spanning decades, is heartening in its willingness to strike out alone, growing only bolder, stranger, more adventurous. That tendency cost her many times, but readers eventually met her where she was, and now the things she depicted look more eerily recognizable than ever.

It’s a slim book of weighty emotion that will leave readers perturbed. I admire it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it ... Victoria Walker, a British academic and chair of the Anna Kavan Society...does a fine job dispelling myths and putting Kavan’s work in its biographical, political, and social contexts, though she does occasionally indulge in special pleading ... Though Kavan’s style changes over the years—she occasionally incorporates collage effects, she dabbles in prose poetry, she introduces more explicit surrealism—the changes are not so dramatic as the introduction suggests ... If there’s a single satisfied, much less a happy, person in these stories, I missed them. Though thirty-odd years separate the first stories in this collection from the last, there’s a claustrophobic unity throughout. Kavan never grants her readers respite. Stories end in catastrophe or in impending doom; axes seem always to hang over the characters’ heads. Even the language unnerves. Sometimes she discomfits with odd, mannered syntax...at other times with frenzy. But perhaps her most familiar mode is complicated pain, simply expressed ... I’m glad this book has been published and I’m glad I read it, but I don’t expect to push Machines in the Head on too many of my friends and acquaintances ... Kavan’s cranial machinery ground this reader to pieces, and when I put the book down, I hesitated to pick it up again. Whether you take this as an endorsement or as a warning is up to you.

Written between the early forties and her death in 1968, the collected texts in NYRB’s new volume do not suggest an author with a 'normal' interior life. They do not necessarily suggest that abnormality is a preferable option, either ... awash in paranoia, baldly Kafkaesque in their obsession with bureaucracy ... Always, there is inclement weather: inescapable, dramatic, and blue as a blue mood ... When nature is not dark and blue, it often manifests as supernature, amplified until its brilliance is perverse ... There may be no better way to describe the impression left by Kavan’s writing than that of a brightness that is too intense to induce pleasure ... When she writes about a woman who sleeps nightly with a leopard, as she does in 1970’s 'A Visit,' she might feasibly be talking about the reality of sharing one’s bed with a man: a gorgeous predator, seductive but impossible to talk to. She might be referring to the experience of addiction. She might just as well be talking about her own brain, its treacherousness, its terrible power.

Anna Kavan is a singular presence in a group that includes the likes of Eve Babitz, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ann Quin, writers whose work has been recently reissued to both acclaim and newfound followings. But Kavan’s writing feels both of the present and uniquely unparalleled ... Her stories feel prescient today; they capture the madness and degradation of isolation and living in a ravaged world, sentiments I can’t help but feel have also been evoked during our self-quarantined present ... Her short stories, the best of which are included in this volume, showcase the vastness of both her style and subject matter ... Comparing Kavan to both Rhys and Lovecraft is not meant to be contradictory. Rather, this comparison evinces Kavan’s incredible talent and verisimilitude: she could do it all. And do it well, at that ... She was fearless and unafraid of calling out the cruelties of this world, many of which were a result of the misogynist trappings of her government and society at large, which all her stories tackle to some degree ... The stories included in this collection are brief, nightmarish, and condensed with paranoia and unavoidable doom. Kavan’s work is disorienting. Her writing gets under your skin. Her characters are both delusional and easy to root for ... Cuddle with Machines In The Head and watch as the apocalypse continues to unfold.

... guides readers through an adventurous writing career that spans—and, in its way, refles—several decades of the twentieth century ... The posthumously published work included in Machines in the Head is generally less interesting than what’s come before. While Kavan’s decadeslong addiction to morphine is perhaps the most sensational detail in her extraordinary life, the stories that explicitly address the drug—'The Old Address' and 'Julia and the Bazooka'—are among the author’s least compelling. The previously unpublished 'Starting a Career' will likely be more interesting to Kavan’s existing fans than her new readers. Editor Victoria Walker makes it clear in her foreword that she chose to include pieces that are not necessarily successful but are nonetheless representative of Kavan’s formal innovations. This is a smart decision on Walker’s part, one that makes Machines in the Head an indispensable introduction to an author who is known—to the extent that she is known at all—as an influence more than an artist ... Kavan deserves recognition among the progenitors and practitioners of speculative fiction in the twentieth century but, even beyond that, her fiction is valuable for limning a world in which existing freely—as a woman, especially, but also as any kind of outsider—is essentially impossible.

Artfully strange short stories from a mostly forgotten 20th-century British writer ... these stories—written over three decades—offer a fascinating study of a writer who was always evolving and are exceptional as literature qua literature. Many of these stories are set in hospitals—or places that might be hospitals or prisons or some combination of the two. Human existence in these spaces is depicted as a nightmare from which neither the protagonist nor the reader can awaken ... Not every story succeeds. 'The Gannets' is simply grotesque. 'The Old Address' is both grotesque and maudlin. A writer fans of experimental fiction should know.

Kavan’s inventive and chilling collection...renders a sustained expression of despair from a writer who suffered from mental illness and heroin addiction, and died in 1968, at age 67 ... While the ceaseless inner torment can become a burden for the reader, flights of fantasy come as welcome relief, such as the freewheeling 'Five More Days to Countdown,' in which the heroic Esmerelda and her lover escape a student revolt via helicopter. Fans of Doris Lessing will appreciate these shattered glimpses into Kavan’s creative mind.