The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit—sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.

I love the combination of smartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodern trashiness in this book: a version of the erotic full of nervous tension which animates the sensuality, and also Zimroth's feeling for words, compressed, ironic, withholding, but also 'asking for it . . . the siege, the thrill, the battle fatigue.' A profoundly urban book, of harsh memory and fantasy, set in harsher reality.

I have wished you dead and myself dead. How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar. And you've set your dogs on me. And a pile of broken sticks. A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasoing, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top... Strong and warm, the summer wind.

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Anyway, what is the soul but a dream of itself?

The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit—sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.

Art destroys silence.