COMING SOON – Out Before Christmas
In the labyrinth of New York City’s Greenwich Village, Robert—a celebrated poet and critic with a genius for language—meets Paula, a brilliant young woman drawn to the light of his mind. His words can capture the meaning of any situation in a nutshell—perfectly phrased, ready to be put into an instant-classic poem or guru’s handbook. Nineteen years apart, they orbit one another in a charged field of intellect, desire, and awakening.
What begins in “hero worship” turns tense, then desperate: an emotional undertow neither can resist. Love becomes initiation, seduction, spirit, voyage.
Across the pages, their charged encounters echo the ancient song of Ulysses and Penelope—recast in a modern key. The sea is now the psyche; the oars are words; just at as much at stake as the outward story is the inner voyage. Around them, Anny and Joseph weave a mirror-story of temptation and self-discovery.
Harrell’s prose dismantles boundaries between novel and meditation, myth and Manhattan. Iconoclastic and experimental, her style of writing shatters every boundary it come across. Memorable also are the clipped-word, charged scenes between Robert and Paula. The result is a journey both romantic and transcendent—a new way of telling what love becomes when consciousness itself is dramatically evolving, sitting on the hinges of an unknown soul intent.
In a soaring surprise move, Volume III shifts to a brand-new location, the Christ State, which has been hinted at all along. Robert introduces Paula to it, initiating the reader along with her. What is the Christ State? Where is it? In Volume III, find out.
Some readers report Harrell’s books are “psycho-active; that is, if they resonate with the energy, they might find it “broadcasted” to them.
With a voice “that ”—says Daniel O’ Bailey, “rings like a punchy snare drum with slap-back delay in every word,” she catches and reshapes life into at once a novel and a spiritual odyssey, testifying to the peril and radiance of transformation through love.
