The Dreaming Girl

Fiction. Introduction by Luisa Valenzuela. A young American traveler in Belize has a brief affair with a man known only as the German. In THE DREAMING GIRL, Roberta Allen's exquisite and incantatory language slyly manifests how reality may be bent and blurred by desires hidden even to ourselves. "[A] literary descendant of Duras, Allen places her unnamed narrator in an exotic Central American limbo that propels her mind into a mesmerizing state somewhere between memory and fantasy"—Ken Foster, The Village Voice. "A choral work where there are endless variations on the same theme, each beautifully developed... The girl's jungle is not some Henri Rousseau sketch conjured second-hand after an afternoon spent at the Jardin de Plants. Rather it has the precision of field notes written by a solipsistic ecologist"—Mary Mackey, The American Book Review. "Roberta Allen transmits the pain and compensating strangeness of living in vignettes as urgent and enigmatic as telegrams"—John Ashbery.