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Ava Klein--thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature--is dying.
From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. In fragments and vignettes, Ava's life unfolds as a spectacular dream theater with a cast of her life's loves. We drift in and out of scenes involving her three former husbands: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. Featured players include the writers that shaped her life: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Wittig, Lorca, Frisch. In a minor key, we hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above the whole chorus we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence."
AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." Now with a new introduction by Jamie Hood, this classic of experimental prose awaits a new generation of readers.
Carole Maso is the author of ten books. Her novels are Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Defiance and Mother & Child. Forthcoming are the novels Eternity and the Dreamer, and What Does She See When She Closes Her Eyes?, and she continues to work on her twenty-year opus, The Bay of Angels. She is also the author of two sequences of poems in prose: Aureole, and Beauty is Convulsive, as well as of a book of essays, Break Every Rule, and a memoir, The Room Lit by Roses. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including, most recently, the 2018 Berlin Prize.
Jamie Hood is the author of Trauma Plot: A Life, the hybrid pandemic diary how to be a good girl, and regards, marcel, a semi-monthly, Proust-infused newsletter. She has published many things in many esteemed places. She lives in Brooklyn.
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