I AM LAZARUS

A haunting collection of 15 short stories about war and mental illness from the hallucinatory yet crystalline pen of Anna Kavan This darkly feverish collection of 15 stories from the cult author of Ice examines war and mental illness from her signature surreal point of view Inspired by Kavan s own experiences nursing traumatized World War II soldiers and as a patient in various asylums these pieces communicate the claustrophobia and isolation of life amidst conflict or caught in the gears of an institutional machine but also the stunning beauty of physical experience as her cast of outsiders find themselves pulled back into the world despite its hostility In the title story a young man living in an asylum must navigate the often unreadable reality around him taking cues from malevolent flowers and inhumanly brisk nurses as we are left to wonder whether the cure harms more than the disease Outside the asylum grounds institutions still exert terrifying power as an unnamed refugee tries to navigate a Kafkan bureaucracy to escape a war ravaged metropolis in Our City Humanity goes to war with nature too in The Gannets a brief disturbing story that predates Daphne du Maurier s The Birds featuring a band of impoverished children engaged in a ho