By Carole Maso
Introduction by Jamie Hood
Paperback: 9781628976557
eBook: 9781628976564
Publication Date: July 21st, 2026
Description
Ava Klein—thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature—is dying.
From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. In fragments and vignettes, Ava's life unfolds as a spectacular dream theater with a cast of her life’s loves. We drift in and out of scenes involving her three former husbands: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. Featured players include the writers that shaped her life: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Wittig, Lorca, Frisch. In a minor key, we hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above the whole chorus we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence."
AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." Now with a new introduction by Jamie Hood, this classic of experimental prose awaits a new generation of readers.
Praise
“What Virginia Woolf did for the prose rhythm of the paragraph, Maso has done for the sentence . . . AVA is to be read slowly, with great pleasure.” —The Chicago Tribune
“Poetic, rapturous.” —New York Times Book Review
“An erotic and moving book, AVA reconfirms Maso's reputation as one of our most refined and daring novelists.” —Booklist
“AVA, Carole Maso’s third novel, is that rare event, a formal literary experiment that is also compelling as a work of fiction. Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried with her far beyond the usual limits of the novel . . . Maso’s voice is all her own: simultaneously cerebral and sensual, violently romantic and insistently woman-centered.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Lovely . . . the product of a rigorous and imaginative formal intelligence.” —Voice Literary Supplement
“Maso is not content to muse on the relationships between life and art; she brings to life a ‘bombardment of images and sounds,’ fashioning a patter of astonishing complexity and beauty. The tough-mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxication.” —Publishers Weekly
“Maso is on the cutting edge . . . She epitomizes all that is great about American literature today.” —Charlotte Innes, Los Angeles Times
“Maso rages on, breaking the rules, stretching genres, and producing an erratic and stunning body of work. She invents, one book at a time, the viable future of fiction she so irreverently calls for. With vulnerability and strength, she challenges the boundaries of ‘twenty-six figures of fire’—our language.” —Carolyn Kuebler, Context
“Richly textured . . . Maso has written another spellbinder.” —Library Journal
“Give Carole Maso and her publisher an A for audacity . . . [AVA] reads like poetry.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“AVA is unique in its blend of prose, poetry, critical theory, and narrative. Maso has created a collage that further blurs the distinction between fiction and poetry and between the modern and the postmodern. Like Pound, she sets ideas and images against one another without drawing narrative connections, encouraging the reader to act as equal participant in constructing images, characters, scenes from Ava’s life, and theory from music, literature, and the visual arts.” —American Book Review
Biographical Note
Carole Maso is the author of ten books. Her novels are Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Defiance and Mother & Child. Forthcoming are the novels Eternity and the Dreamer, and What Does She See When She Closes Her Eyes?, and she continues to work on her twenty-year opus, The Bay of Angels. She is also the author of two sequences of poems in prose: Aureole, and Beauty is Convulsive, as well as of a book of essays, Break Every Rule, and a memoir, The Room Lit by Roses. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including, most recently, the 2018 Berlin Prize.
Jamie Hood is the author of Trauma Plot: A Life, the hybrid pandemic diary how to be a good girl, and regards, marcel, a semi-monthly, Proust-infused newsletter. She has published many things in many esteemed places. She lives in Brooklyn.