In passages often recalling the sensuous prose of Ali Smith, After Sappho tracks not just outer movement, but psychological ambulation, picking up on the subtlest shifts in mood with the delicacy of a weathervane. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - New York TimesĪ brilliant debut. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments.'

'Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future?' Schwartz asks. She draws from history in order to reimagine it. The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse for certainty or linear cohesion. For the most part, these men simply do not appear in the book at all. Schwartz builds a novel around women’s struggles for self-determination, excising the men who were in their way. It is, however, a work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams.Īfter Sappho considers the intimate moments beyond historical record, shifting our gaze and questioning the discipline of history itself. The result is not quite narrative fiction and not quite history either.

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s first novel follows a meandering course through the late 19th century into the early 20th, focusing on the lives and overlapping connections of an array of real women. Brava!”-Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, NewburyportĪfter Sappho accomplishes what only the most generous art can: It makes a more perfect world out of the imperfections of our own. “This book is splendid: Impish, irate, deep, courageous.

A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

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, Selby Wynn 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. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. “ The first thing we did was change our names. “A work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams.'Īn exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection

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