LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Dorothy Bryant's novels and plays use a variety of settings, from the allegorical island of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You to her own San Francisco Bay Area (Ella Price's Journal, Miss Giardino, Confessions of Madame Psyche), revolutionary ninenteenth-century France (Dear Master), and South America (Anita, Anita). Her underlying theme is always the same: the struggle of the human spirit to know and become itself.
Privately published in the Bay Area in 1971, this certainly deserves commercial resurrection. A confused, angry representative of civilization finds himself on the serene island of Ata - the center of the world - where twelve kas of twelve people live out the necessities of a bare agricultural existence with a grace and joy based on the principle of giving. The kin (people) of Ata preserve a remarkable self-knowledge through dreams, in which they also sadly observe the cruel and wretched exile kingdoms of the rest of humanity. The cynical anonymous narrator (fresh from the commission of a crime in the exile-world) gradually finds his place among the kin. Bryant does not escape the goody-goody qualifies of utopian homily, but her central premises (the giving, the dreaming) are presented with simplicity and strength. (Kirkus Reviews)
