Ann Quin
The Unmapped Country
This new collection of rare and unpublished writing by the cult 1960s author Ann Quin explores the risks and seductions of going over the edge. The stories cut an alternative path across innovative twentieth-century writing, bridging the world of Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan with that of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.
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- Edited by Jennifer Hodgson
- If you had subscribed to And Other Stories before 12 June 2017, you would have received a first edition copy of the book – in which all subscribers are thanked by name – before its official publication, as well us up to five other And Other Stories titles per year. Find out about subscribing to upcoming titles here.
- You can read writers including Deborah Levy, Joanna Walsh, Juliet Jacques and Danielle Dutton on Ann Quin in Music & Literature No. 7.
- Jennifer Hodgson’s introduction to The Unmapped Country can be read in the New Statesman.
- Read an excerpt from Quin’s unpublished novel fragment ‘The Unmapped Country’ in the Times Literary Supplement.
Print status: Available
Author: Ann Quin
Original language: English
Format: B-format paperback
Publication date: 18 January 2018
ISBN: 9781911508144
Ebook ISBN: 9781911508151
Availability: World
Number of pages: 124
Reviews
Juliet Jacques
‘One of Britain’s most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring, Quin’s relentlessly experimental prose reads like nobody else.’
Deborah Levy
‘Quin understood she was on to something new and she took herself seriously, in the right way; she had a serious sense of her literary purpose.’
New York Times Book Review
‘Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools… every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship.’
Lee Rourke
The Guardian
‘She is one of our greatest ever novelists. Ann Quin’s was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and – dare I say it – ultimately European.'
Danielle Dutton
‘Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention—rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid.’
Chloe Aridjis
‘Ann Quin is a master painter of interiors, of voices that mosaic as they catch the light at strange, stirring angles.’
Tom McCarthy
‘After her death in 1973 at only 37, Ann Quin’s star first dipped beneath the horizon, disappearing from view entirely, before rising slowly but persistently, to the point that it’s now attaining the septentrional heights it always merited. I suspect that she’ll eventually be viewed, alongside BS Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter.’
Andrew Gallix
The Guardian
‘Spanning the author’s entire career, The Unmapped Country builds up a portrait of the artist as a restless spirit, forever adventuring into the unknown. The diversity on display is impressive . . . her work is as open-ended as those sentences she regularly produced that trail off into silence, casting a spell instead of spelling out; floating away on their reserve of potentiality.’
Ben Lawrence
The Telegraph
‘Exuberance and humanity blossom from Quin's prose, which is also very funny . . . Although you can detect Virginia Woolf’s legacy here, there is a contemporary truth about Quin’s work, a desire to dwell in her own experiences.’
Lucy Scholes
The Financial Times
‘Even when recounting despair, Quin’s prose is as sharp as a deadly blade, flashing between light and dark with arresting effect. Reintroducing this exciting, important writer to the world is the perfect start to And Other Stories’ year of publishing women.’
Jonathan Coe
The Spectator
‘[Quin's] militant refusal to compromise flavours her writing: you either take her on her own terms, or not at all. [Her writing is] richer and stranger than the satisfactions of mainstream fiction.’
Ian Maleney
Irish Times
The Unmapped Country is an ideal title [for the collection]: Quin set off in search of unknown pleasures, a sensual experience of words and life both intimate and distant. What slight and elusive treasures she discovered there, what precious fragments.’
Julia Jordan
Times Literary Supplement
‘Quin nails bleak locales . . . with descriptions of bathetic infidelities in seedy seaside towns, moments where the fantasy of an encounter or relationship and its squalid reality are at odds, and nothing is ever satisfactory.’
Los Angeles Review of Books
'Quin’s short fiction is rightly reclaimed and republished by And Other Stories, and Jennifer Hodgson has done us a service by gathering these stories together. The Unmapped Country is a tantalizing read.’
Lauren Kane
The Paris Review
‘When I took piano lessons as a child, I was taught how to play notes staccato, striking each one with a quick hit of the key; such is the prose of Ann Quin. She writes a third-person narrative that silkily slides, in the style of stream of consciousness, through the heads of her characters. I’m chagrinned that it took me this long to find her work.’
