Carla Harryman is as famous for the books she hasn't yet published (such as her novel in progress, Gardener of Stars ,or the
collaboration with Lyn Hejinian, The Wide Road) as for the ones she has. Today we're here to celebrate the move of one long-awaited work from column A to column B, as O Books presents us with The Words, Harryman's unique blend of Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Tales and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Words.Harryman is the author of Vice, Animal Instincts, There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn ,and the play Memory Play.With its extended narrative games, its fateful Sadeian psychology, The Words fractures childhood and conventional notions of the child, revealing the fever dream of selfhood under the placid skin of youth, of poetry, of the amused. We've missed her in the Bay Area since she took off for the wilds of Grosse Pointe, and oh, how we're glad she's back.
September 17, 1999
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