I Am Lazarus

A collection of fifteen short stories about war and mental illness, from the hallucinatory yet crystalline pen of Anna Kavan.

These 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 Second World War 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. In the title story, a young man living in an asylum must navigate the often unreadable reality around him, 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 Kafkaesque 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. At times cleanly modernist, at others ornately strange and dream-like, Kavan's writing is always propulsive, powered by the tension between the menace closing in around her characters, and the incomparable loveliness of the strange world they inhabit.