"I KNOW THAT I'M DOOMED AND I'M NOT GOING TO STRUGGLE AGAINST MY FATE"

KAVAN, Anna. Asylum Piece and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, (1940). Octavo, original beige cloth, original dust jacket. $1950.

First edition of Helen Ferguson's first book to be published under her nom de plume, Anna Kavan.

Born Helen Emily Woods, British novelist Anna Kavan is "one of the most mysterious of modern writers" (J.G. Ballard). "Kavan's contemporary Lawrence Durrell saw her as a writer in the lineage of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes; others have placed Ice in the canon of drug novels, along with De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Huxley's Brave New World." This collection is "a strangely, uncannily penetrating study of the workings of the diseased mind, the unrealities become realities, the withdrawal into the intangible world, the breakdown of personality—and, most extraordinary of all, the flashes of clarity, understanding and despair. Some of the stories are told in the first person; others in the third; all deal with people in the asylum, or on brief leave of absence in the outside world" (Kirkus).

Book with faint foxing to endpapers, edges of text block, and original cloth, and mild toning to spine. Dust jacket with slightest foxing, mild rubbing to edges, and a bit of toning to spine. An extremely good copy.