In The Slammer With Carol Smith - Hardcover

Hortense Calisher has written more than twenty books. Past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

CAROL MONDA is a two-time AudieŽ Award-winning narrator, with over 15 years of experience. She is also a veteran actress and voiceover artist for stage, radio, television, and film.

Although the novel provides a frank, unbiased exploration of homelessness, its strength is at times undercut by the flimsiness of its plot. Yet Calisher's vibrant, erratic rhythms make Carol's observations continually surprising. In the Slammer with Carol Smith is as jazzy as its title. If you're willing to look past the vagaries of its plotting to its remarkable prose, Calisher's book will yield ample rewards. -- The New York Times Book Review, Emily Barton

One afternoon in the early seventies, Carol is sent out for Chinese food, and while she is away, the explosive device which her revolutionary student friends are busy construction, accidentally goes off, causing enormous damage. Here friends get away, but she is incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her social worker, and an irresistible urge to slip away and live somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other false possessions. When she discovers even her social worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off to sleep rough on city's streets again. Turning away from her dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and responsibilities slowly return to her. In The Slammer With Carol Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts, the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of compromise. -- Midwest Book Review