Personal Effects

A collection of stories and journals by a writer whose underground reputation has become legendary since her first book, SHELTERED LIFE, appeared in 1975, and whose most recent book, RHODE ISLAND RED, was published by Serpent's Tail in 1997.

Like the music her characters listen to or sing, Charlotte Carter's writing may be lyrical or funky, or melancholic and bittersweet. She's always wry and economical. Her touch is delicate and tough, as she explores issues around race and sexuality, as she wittily cajoles the reader to notice how much bitter and more complicated the picture really is.--Lynne Tillman

I love Charlotte Carter's writing. Prose, poetry, parody and elegy, it's full of rhythmic and visual subtlety, awfully funny and awfully melancholy. She's never pious or rhetorical about The Self, The Race or The World; she's on the move instead, testing and transforming whatever it is the psyche and the culture have to offer. She sees and feels and thinks like no one else. She's funny that way.--Margo Jefferson

In Charlotte Carter's writing, there is a deceptive reserve of understatement that abruptly transforms itself into intense candor... Characters continually grapple with an assumed solitariness, seeking some private satisfaction in the lucidity of their thoughts. It's always amazing to see in this work how so much dense information of a vital nature gets communicated so fluidly, and how writing that's so formally ambitious can remain so intimate and accessible.--Ed Friedman

Cover by Angela Fremont

Poetry.