Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others- Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Non-fiction. Her forthcoming novella A Life in Chameleons received the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award.
‘This book is splendid: impish, irate, deep, courageous, moving,
funny…and truly significant, I think.’
*Lucy Ellmann*
‘It’s brilliant, an unobtrusive, quietly mesmerising, imagined
collocation of linked feminist lives that succeeds in delineating a
movement bigger than all of them without diminishing any one of
them.’
*Ian Patterson*
'Glorious, magnificent, truly liberating…After Sappho is a
testimony to those on the margins, the outsiders; to those women
who don’t fit in and don’t want to. It is about anyone who has
fought, and continues to do so. As a gay man I found myself in its
pages. I was another Sappho, too.’
*Vivek Tejuja, reviewer and culture editor, Verve Magazine*
‘This book is dynamite. I have tick marks on every page.’
*Todd McEwen*
'An absolute marvel.’
*Stephen Sparks, bookseller and editor, lithub.com*
‘Entrancing...Not just a feminist manifesto, After Sappho is also a
testimony to the beauty of women – not in a material sense, but
rather in celebration of their intelligence, their strength and
their endurance to keep fighting for a better future.’
*Aurelia Orr, Readings*
‘After Sappho is superb. Mesmerising. Such incredible writing. And
thinking. Selby Wynn Schwartz tips everyone out of the water.’
*Deborah Levy*
‘A glorious, genre-expanding work of fiction... Spell-binding.’
*Telegraph*
‘Enthralling…A gorgeous celebration of pioneering thinkers who
rejected docility and self-abnegation in favour of finding their
true selves…[A] sparkling, imaginative gem.’
*Independent*
‘Highly original…[An] entrancing choric collage of a novel which
seems to speak both in one voice and in multitudes all at the same
time…I loved it.’
*Claire Allfree, Daily Mail*
'Drifting and dreamy...I really enjoyed it.’
*Quentin Johnson, RNZ Nine to Noon*
‘A bold original, story of creativity and freedom...The sentences,
crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism, feel so
easily, casually of our time.’
*Lara Feigel, Guardian*
‘Fierce and succinct yet rippling with beautifully observed
detail...A book unlike any I have previously read.’
*Bookmunch*
‘Lyrical, scholarly, passionate and entirely unique.’
*Justine Jordan, Guardian*
‘A triumph.’
*Age*
‘An ecstatic read…Selby Wynn Schwartz gives us a dark herstory; one
that is hysterically funny, poetic and maddeningly tender. It is
skin and sinew and breath and longing. And becoming.’
*Conversation*
‘I have a feeling that as good as this book is on first reading, it
will be even better on subsequent readings, such is the density,
scope and research that has gone into its making.’
*Herald Sun*
‘Rousing, provocative and elegant…there is inspiration to be found
in these spirited reflections…so many of the issues these women
faced, fought and sacrificed so much for are still so prevalent
now. After Sappho is an ambitious literary project that delivers on
its own promise with great stylistic power and verve.’
*Irish Times*
‘Fascinating and luminously depicted…Schwartz encapsulates a
beautiful, longing poesis.’
*ArtsHub*
‘Themes of feminine creativity constantly circle fluid
identity…Although the fragments are set a century ago, the novel
feels modern and contemporary.’
*New Zealand Listener*
‘Compelling and engrossing.’
*iNews*
‘Extraordinarily confident and inventive…An urgent manifesto for
female emancipation and for the broad church of womanhood.’
*New Statesman*
‘Enchanting...Unique...Awe-inspiring...In this Greek chorus of a
novel, After Sappho joins the ranks of delectable, Woolf-inspired
works.’
*Firstpost*
‘Daring…Revisionary…[After Sappho] takes a lesson from its
subjects, women who passed across identities, who defied
convention.’
*Times Literary Supplement*
‘Stopped me in my tracks…A very beautiful way to honour these
creative people…Radical.’
*ABC RN Bookshelf*
‘Inventive and elegiac…[Schwartz] opens a wide door to the
twentieth-century queer women who dared to think, write, and act
according to their own will.’
*Firstpost*
‘After Sappho, a fiction that contains a multitude of of real
women, is seductive, elegiac and unclassifiable...With great
finesse, Schwartz conjures the feelings, atmospheres, influences,
rumours and desires that emanated from these women and swirled
around them...In After Sappho, Schwartz draws lesbians out of
anonymity and into history, ensuring that those ignored, excluded
or denigrated now and in the future be looked back upon as
trailblazers. As Sappho predicted: “You may forget but let me tell
you this: someone in some future time will think of us.”’
*Brixton Review of Books*
‘Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho…plays with form, reclaiming
hidden lesbian stories by tumbling together biography, scholarship
and poetic flights of fancy…This one-of-a-kind book channels a
spirit of righteous anger as well as lyrical freedom and joy.’
*Guardian (UK)*
‘A gorgeous celebration of those pioneering women thinkers who
rejected docility in favour of being more than just “little dolls
who danced for the pleasure of their husbands and annihilated
themselves”.’
*Independent*
‘A very creative take on the female artist and independent woman in
the early twentieth century, After Sappho is thoroughly enjoyable
but also thought-provoking literature…Well worthwhile.’
*Complete Review*
‘[A] powerful genre-bending debut novel.’
*New Yorker*
‘After Sappho creates a vision of creative, sexual, and romantic
connection between women that is as lush and joyful as it is
enraged by men’s violence.’
*Australian Book Review*
‘Both a history of lesbian modernists told in biographical
fragments and a novel made of interconnected stories. The book’s
narrator is a chorus, the “we” of feminist modernists, of women
writers, of lesbians, of queer readers looking for our reflections
in art. I’ve read it so many times my margin notes have margin
notes. I bought a copy for my best friend’s birthday and filled it
with yet more margin notes. I’ve never read a book that feels so
much like a conversation I was somehow already a part of. Beautiful
and endlessly inspiring.’
*Moira Fowley*
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