We Were Forbidden
For readers who first met Harpman via her melancholic digital afterlife, We Were Forbidden will arrive as a revelation. The gem of the collection is its longest story, 'The Broom Closet,' a sex farce that wrangles its author’s ideas about artistic permanence into a more prosaic form ... Arch, light-fingered, and very funny.
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Harpman, the author of over fifteen works of fiction, deserves to be virally rediscovered. Transit Books has now collected three newly translated novellas ... They read like preparatory sketches ... They also expand Harpman’s range, showcasing a capacity for lightness, even humor ... In Harpman’s desperate, ornery, and alien universes, her avatars write their memoirs for no one at all. It is a desolate prospect, but also a triumph. If only she could see them now.
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Across these works, Harpman traces variations of the same psychic drama. Her dystopias diagnose the mind under pressure: how it defends, divides, and turns against itself ... Having lived through displacement, illness, and the violence of institutions, Harpman understands how quickly prohibitions take root. The world may collapse, but the mind continues to enforce its codes.
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