Empathy

by Sarah Schulman, Kevin Killian (Introduction)

Overview

A Little Sister's Classic: Sarah Schulman's beautiful, subtly transgressive novel about identity, sexual politics, and self-esteem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551524016
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	01/15/2011
Series:	Little Sister's Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	221 KB

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of eleven previous books, including eight novels, the latest being The Child (2006). As a journalist, her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Interview. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and two American Library Association Gay&Lesbian Book Awards. She lives in New York. Kevin Killian is the author of a novel, a short-story collection, and books of poetry; he is also co-author of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. He lives in San Francisco.

What People are Saying About This

Kate Millett

"Breaks into new territory...as fun and nervy and outrageous as ever."

Meg Wolitzer

"Painful and funny and extremely wise."

Fay Weldon

"With Empathy, the lesbian novel comes of age."

Editorial Reviews

A new novel, challenging in concept and execution, from the author of the ALA/SRRT Gay and Lesbian Book Award winner "After Delores". The last of a "generation [that] believe[d] the future would be better," Anna seeks the world she was promised as a child of the 1960s and survives by simultaneously being many personalities living in different worlds of perception. Doc is a street-corner psychiatrist, "working for his answer in other people," who doesn't need to prescribe drugs since "his patients had enough of them already." Finding societal structures falling apart around her, gossip more interesting than reality, and no one ultimately responsible for anything, Anna seeks out Doc to help her resolve her quest for happiness. The stylistically challenging book about them alternates between reality and fantasy, childhood flashbacks and current love affairs, straight narrative and dramatic scenarios with play-script presentation of dialogue. Finally, in a gender-bending answer to the question "How many times can a person be told she will never be fully human unless she becomes a man?" Anna empathetically transforms herself into Doc--with comic consequences.

Marie Kuda