AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz - Spotlight

 

“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, 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.

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

AFTER SAPPHO was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Selby Wynn Schwartz

Schwartz is the author of THE BODIES OF OTHERS: DRAG DANCES AND THEIR AFTERLIVES, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction and won the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research. 

Her forthcoming novella A LIFE IN CHAMELEONS, due out in 2023, won the Reflex Press Novella Award. The author of numerous published articles, Schwartz holds a PhD in comparative literature (Italian/French) from the University of California, Berkeley and currently teaches writing at Stanford University.