Gladys Swan
Gladys Swan's The World of Carnival is available on Amazon.com..
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In this chapbook, you will find the first chapters of Carnival for the Gods, and the three novels that form a sequence from Gladys Swan’s comic fantasy, first published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. The World of Carnival, continues with its original inhabitants and their struggles against the odds: Alta and Dusty, who dream big; the midget Curran, who undertakes a journey at the behest of the acrobat Elise, whose son has gone mad (Small Wonder); the Kid, who, after a long search, sets out to find the Seventh City, picking up along the way a melancholy Jew, who grew up there (The Dreamseekers). And, finally, a return to Alta, who finds herself drawn back to the circus to follow another set of dreams (Down to Earth). The series of novels explores the relations between life and art, reality and illusion, the openness to possibility and the capacity for the renewal of energies within a culture. It is the writer’s major work, and it is her dream that the sequence may one day be published.
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Praise
“Gladys Swan has written a tough-talking, free-wheeling, high-flying study of ideas . . .
‘an inquiry into the nature of the peculiar.” With a fine irony, Carnival for the Gods places us front-row- center at the greatest show on earth: ourselves.”
—Kelly Cherry, Author of In the Wink of an Eye and The Lost Traveler’s Dream.
“Carnival for the Gods is a book of holy and unholy struggle, but it’s not a struggle to read. Swan controls action, meditation, and an impressive number of memorable minor
characters that entice the reader to follow the carnival through the exquisitely-drawn desert landscapes.”
—Prairie Schooner
“Carnival for the Gods is an artful, curious book, adventuresome and compelling.”
—Chicago Tribune.
“. . . an enchantment worth the price of admission.”
—lThe New York Times, Charles Johnson, Author of Middle Passage and Dreamer.
“Much of the beauty of Gladys’ Swan’s fiction inheres in her skill at balancing
earthiness with cosmic vision.
—Sewanee Review Thomas E. Kennedy, Author of In the Company of Angels.
Information about the Author
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Gladys Swan has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods (Vintage Contemporaries Series) and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the Pen/Faulkner Award. She has published six collections of short fiction, the most recent being A Garden Amid Fires. Her short fiction has appeared in such literary magazines as the Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Manoa, Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner, where she was awarded the Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction. In 200l, she received the Tate Prize for Poetry from the Sewanee Review. She was awarded one of the first Open Fellowships from the Lilly Endowment for a study of Inuit art and mythology and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Fundacion Valpariso in Spain, and the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, and the Martha’s Vineyard Writers’ Residency. She has received various fellowships for residencies in painting at the Vermont Studio Center, where she has also been a Guest Writer.
Gladys Swan Interviewed
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Logo art by Barry Lereng Wilmont
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