After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century.
"The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho." So begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse.
Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths. In 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: "I want to make life fuller and fuller."
Writing in cascading vignettes, Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives.
A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.
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“A triptych of women who refuse to be stifled by societal expectations of femininity. The story unfolds as a series of sensuous fragments that would make the titular Greek poet proud.”
— Electric Literature
“Desire, art, and politics lead the dance in After Sappho.”
— New Statesman“Schwartz breathes an astonishing sense of life into her timeless characters.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley.