Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called “experimental” wave of British novelists of the 1960s.
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The influential, daring, and lacerating novels of Ann Quin were very much products of their time—but Quin herself had more than a little influence upon shaping the era in which she lived. Her works bracket the ’60s and embrace their drive to experiment and break through to another form of consciousness, and so another means of telling stories, as J. G. Ballard and B. S. Johnson were doing, and as, later—in many ways following directly in Quin’s footsteps—Kathy Acker would as well. In reading Quin we are taught to question the very enterprise of fiction itself: one must be prepared to lose one’s way. Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called “experimental” wave of British novelists of the 1960s.
Robert Buckeye is the author of several books of fiction, including Still Lives, a novel about the Kent State shootings, and Fade, a novel of Bratislava. He has written numerous articles and reviews on literature, art, and film, and is also the author of the Quarry Books series: ten booklets about Vermonters in the American grain. He divides his time between Vermont and Bratislava.