The Words After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre

Fiction. In THE WORDS, Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character and plot. There’s a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her deconstructions — and always a devotion to language, its elasticity and limits. I admire Harryman’s rare mind, its gleeful feminism, broad intelligence and anarchic inventiveness! — Lynne Tillman. At last, children’s literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla Harryman’s WORDS is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually unnaming names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to hybridizing texts. Bold and subversive! — Marjorie Welish.