The Test • Anita, Anita • Literary Lynching • The Berkeley Pit

Ella Price's Journal

Among the many novels about "re-entry women" published in the 1970s, Ella Price's Journal is unique in featuring a working class protagonist entering a two-year college. Some of the scenes have become stock features of fiction of consciousness-raising in women, but the first 40 to 60 pages of Ella's journal endure as a record of the emergence of a questing mind, of any age and sex, opening in a universally tumultuous process. Some scenes are valuable bits of history—like an eye-witness description of the first Berkeley mass march protesting the Vietnam War in October of 1965.

"Fresh and Engaging"
—New York Times

The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You

A ruthlessly "successful" man is transported to what he gradually learns is a not-so-primitive island, where people are guided by their dreams. Initially in conflict with their ways, the protagonist, according to Bryant, "is dragged kicking and screaming to his own salvation." An allegory of spiritual growth, composed of principles from all the world's religious disciplines, stirred up together and flavored with a pinch of Jung.

"One of my favorite books in all the world"
Alice Walker

Miss Giardino

Inspired by a friend's derogatory reference to "those hatchet-faced, old maid schoolteachers we had in school," this is Bryant's tribute to the dedicated, unappreciated, life-long teachers of her childhood in San Francisco's immigrant, working-class Mission District. Using scenes from her mother's difficult childhood and her own experiences and observations as an inner-city high school teacher, Bryant builds a portrait of an unsung hero of integrity and purpose.

"Squarely confronts the question of individual and societal values in a fast-changing world. A fine book"
—Library Journal

Killing Wonder

One of the reviews described this novel perfectly: "as a murder mystery, fair to middling; as a send-up of the publishing scene, irresistible fun." Bryant—"a feminist since age two"—says she was having fun presenting a mystery in which the victim is an icon of feminist writers and the suspects are all women writers with literary ambition as their motive. "A lot of women were angry at me, so I must have been doing something right."

"Irresistible fun"
—The Nation

A Day in San Francisco

Asked about the gestation of this novel, Bryant quotes Ring Lardner: "Writing is easy, you just sit down and open a vein." She also describes this as a protest novel, the protester not a young rebel, but a middle-aged liberal, activist mother who sees her son caught up in a liberation movement gone wrong. Critical of the gay promiscuity promoted in San Francisco's Castro District in the 1970s and early 1980s, the book sounded the first warning of the AIDS epidemic and provoked hostile reaction that inspired Bryant's non-fiction Literary Lynching.

"Painful, probing novel of uncommon power"
—Kirkus Reviews

Writing a Novel

This unassuming book on writing fiction welcomes the uncertain beginner into a virtual community of writers struggling through the ages. It is used both in beginning classes and by experienced writers, one of whom said, "I always read it again just before I start a new book." Other creative people have called it helpful "to anyone, in any of the arts." Inspirational, yet infused with tough-minded common sense.

"Best of its kind"
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

Myths to Lie By

A mixture of published and unpublished short pieces: essays, reviews, stories, letters, even an early attempt at a short play.

"Weeds out rumor, fear, evasion, and the false myths we live by" —San Jose Mercury News

Confessions of Madame Psyche

Based on the myth of Psyche and Eros, this novel is set in the Bay Area during the first half of the twentieth century. It operates on two levels: 1) a story of spiritual growth, and 2) a history of little known or forgotten episodes and locations, like the pre-war Hunters Point of San Francisco, the orchard-covered Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley, and the hidden world of Napa State Hospital before it and the five other state farms sheltering the mentally ill expelled its patients onto our streets.

Awarded the BEFORE COLUMBUS FOUNDATION's American Book Award in 1987.
Dramatized by theatre company WORD FOR WORD in opening festivities for the new San Francisco Main Public Library in 1997.

"Fascinating and beautiful" —Ursula K. LeGuin

The Test

Bryant describes this short novel as "all too autobiographical." Middle-aged protagonist Pat, now in the "sandwich generation," is making her weekly visit to her aged, widowed father, who is struggling to keep the driver's license he shouldn't have. When she leaves him, she must go to the hospital where her son's lover lies dying of AIDS. Throughout this strange day, Pat reviews and revises old, shifting family memories, trying to fix on "what really happened." Surprisingly, with its unsparing examination of grief and fear, The Test may yet be Bryant's funniest novel.

"Sharp, harsh recognitions...masterful"
—Kirkus Reviews

Anita, Anita

Giuseppe Garbaldi, hero of the unification of Italy in 1870, was once the most famous man in the western world. Historians touch only briefly on his years (1835-1848) in South America, where he met Anita, the woman warrior who fought beside him in South America and in Rome, and who bore his first four children before dying in battle. Bryant resurrects a feminist hero of Brazilian and Italian history.

"Bits of folklore, colorful geographic details"
—Library Journal

Literary Lynching:
When Readers Censor Writers

What happens when a writer publishes a truth that some readers would prefer not to acknowledge? If reaction grows and spreads, it may become strong enough to constitute a sort of unofficial censorship. Those who want to suppress the book may combine distortion, misrepresentation, and name-calling to persuade readers to condemn the author and refuse to read the book. Bryant discusses six famous authors—Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, William Styron—who suffered such attacks by "literary lynch mobs." She concludes with a memoir of similar attacks on her novel, A Day in San Francisco.

The Berkeley Pit

Bryant's new novel is named for an actual pit mine in Butte, Montana, where protagonist Harry was born in 1947. In 1967 Harry finds himself in Berkeley, California. He is briefly caught up in the exciting events of that era before going back to Montana. In 1987 Harry fulfills his dream of returning to Berkeley. The author brings to this novel her family history in the mining culture of Butte, and her own forty-year residency in Berkeley.

(2007)
Clark City Press
Cloth $25.00
ISBN 978-0-944439