Description
Fiction. Carla Harryman describes GARDENER OF STARS as "an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex—all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process.
Author Bio
Carla Harryman is an American poet, prose writer, playwright and performance writer. She is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of Bard College. In 1979, she co-founded the San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater. Recent performance work includes the CD Open Box, published on the Tzadik label and international performances in Austria, France, Germany, and Montreal. In addition to twenty volumes of single- authored work, Harryman has two edited volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of Journal of Narrative Theory and Lust for Life: The Writings of Kathy Acker, co-edited with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder. Harryman has received grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fund for Poetry, Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among others. Her works have appeared in translation in Czech, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Serbian. Her most recent works are A VOICE TO PERFORM: ONE OPERA / TWO PLAYS (SplitLevel Texts, 2020), SUE IN BERLIN (PURH, 2018) and L'impromptu de Hannah (joca seria, 2018).
Author City: DETROIT, MI USA