To After That (TOAF)

“Incredibly, Gladman pulls off a story about a failed piece of writing that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Instead, it’s packed with wonderfully strange ideas (while writing After That, Gladman wondered if she was existing in the realm of fiction), & it builds to a clarifying conclusion about the relief of letting a project go. This is a marvel.” —Publishers Weekly

“TOAF is a slim little volume, but its pages swallow the world whole. If My Lesbian Novel is a book about a book coming into being, TOAF is a book about a book that never came to be. Gladman’s books confront endings like lunar cycles, rebirth inherent on their face.” — Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic & wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.

Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism & memoir & philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities & My Lesbian Novel.
TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space & life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process & distance & duration, & a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.

°°°

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, & geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing & architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka & its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), & Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy.