This collection of Anna Kavan’s short fiction and journalism marks fifty years since her death in 1968. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder- including the previously unpublished story Starting a Career - the writings collected in Machines in the Head offer an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of Kavan’s diverse writing talents for her fans.

In Machines in the Head readers will encounter: oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and asylum incarceration from Asylum Piece (1940); moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945); fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958); and stories of heroin addiction from Julia and the Bazooka. Her late sci-fi stories will appeal to fans of her last novel Ice, and published here for the first time, her story Starting a Career is a futuristic spy-thriller, whose protagonist sets out to become the world’s greatest enigma.