Lina Poletti News Today

Two new books aim to paint a fuller picture of lesbian experience than existing archives can provide. But what they leave out speaks volumes.

Schwartz’s narrator speaks in the choral “we”, and like a daisy chain, they connect all these women’s shared yet individual experiences of feeling closed in, being violated, feeling misunderstood by society, until they all shed their names and managed to “escap[e] the century”.

Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is partly a love letter to Virginia Woolf and poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a speculative biography.

Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is partly a love letter to Virginia Woolf and poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a speculative biography.

Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is partly a love letter to Virginia Woolf and poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a speculative biography.

“After Sappho,” Selby Wynn Schwartz’s debut novel, considers the lives of women artists and intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century.

Our picks for the best books publishing the week of January 23, 2023.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Brusatte, After Sappho by Schwartz, The Story of Art Without Men by Hessel and All Down Darkness Wide by Hewitt.

An excerpt from ‘After Sappho,’ by Selby Wynn Schwartz.

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel is not just an important re-writing or righting of herstory, or a new view on queer feminists in turn-of-the-century Europe.