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For Immediate Release

You, Me, & the Insects by Barbara Henning
ISBN 0-9720662-6-8      $14.95 US   |   $19.95 CAN       304 pages


Barbara Henning's novel, You, Me, and the Insects, is cumulative, the
narrative, detail by detail, drawing the reader into Gina's tense and
ecstatic experiences as she travels from the East Village to south India to
study with a Brahmin acharya, a master teacher of meditation, philosophy and
hatha yoga. While negotiating daily life in a third world country, Gina also
conducts a careful examination of her present reactions, as well as her life
during the 70s in Detroit when she lived in a bohemian community with her
lover and family. Her teacher instructs her in how to transform her
samskara–impressions left from previous actionsso that the present moment
becomes illuminated.

You, Me, and the Insects is a heartening, bittersweet story of a spiritual struggle and
transformation, told in parallel universes of mother, writer, wife in secular USA and dedicated
struggling western yogini in luminously detailed India. The writing is marvelously rich, layered,
the narrative is compelling. The phenomenal world is the source of terrific insight, delight and
surprise. This is not a pretentious New Age memoir but an ageless picaresque and imaginative
voyage.  A major accomplishment for this  extremely salient, charged writer.   Anne Waldman

This is a miracle of a book. Barbara Henning has taken seemingly unpromising materials–the
demanding study of yoga in southern India; the daily incidents of life there; the recollection of
starting a family with a husband now dead–and transformed them into a narrative that is gripping,
entertaining, and intensely moving. It is a triumph of imagination restoring irresistible vivacity to the
perishable treasures of memory.  Harry Mathews