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Sarah Schulman (1958 - )
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 Girls,
Visions and Everything : A Novel by
Sarah Schulman
This reissued novel takes readers on a "wry
and playful" (Out!) tour of lesbian sex, politics, and art in
New York City. The city's sizzling -- especially at the
Kitsch-Inn, where the girls are mounting an all-female production
of A Streetcar Named Desire.
"A quirky novel about lesbians on the Lower
East Side of New York. They fall in love, have sex with friends,
imagine themselves as great American heroes, work dull jobs, and
endear themselves to the reader. Schulman richly describes
lesbians in the context of their own community and the larger
society around them. Very funny, very sexy." -- Anonymous
Review
 Shimmer
by
Sarah Schulman
Shimmer is the fifth
(and, to date, best) novel from Sarah Schulman, the lesbian bard
of contemporary urban fiction. Set in Manhattan during the
harrowing McCarthy era of the early 1950s, the book follows Sylvia
Golubowsky, a Brooklyn-born and bred gay Jewish woman who aspires
to a career as a reporter, biding her time as the head typist in
the stenographer pool of a major New York tabloid; the aptly named
Austin Van Cleeve, a conniving, pretentious
"blue-blooded" Republican gossip columnist armed with a
sinister pen that threatens both New York City and Washington,
D.C.; and Cal Byfield, an African American Columbia University
graduate married to a white jazz pianist, who finds himself
working as a short-order cook while seeking recognition as a great
American playwright.
It is through the eyes of each of these richly
drawn characters, whose lives overlap in unexpected and credible
ways, that Schulman so artfully depicts the tempo and texture of
one of the lowest points in American history. Here we witness a
young, insecure, and vengeful Richard Nixon as he seeks to destroy
Alger Hiss to advance his own career from the perspective of
Sylvia, who reveals her desire to elect the Progressive Party
presidential candidate Henry Wallace, and from that of racist,
archconservative Van Cleeve, who would do almost anything to see
Eisenhower in office. And, through Schulman's sensitive and
skillful prose, we experience the struggles Byfield must face to
assert and maintain his integrity while trying to break out as a
serious writer as he works to get his plays produced on Broadway.
A major departure for Schulman in both content
and style, Shimmer is at once a memorable entertainment and
an excellent evocation of race, class, and sex in postwar New
York. --Kera Bolonik
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By Michael Bronski, Boston
Phoenix
Excerpt:
Sarah Schulman's sixth novel, Rat Bohemia
... is a popular and critical success in the gay-and-lesbian
press. But Schulman is not particularly optimistic about the
future of lesbian or gay writing in the mainstream - especially
lesbian writing.
Rat Bohemia
is a strangely comic, powerful novel that deals with the decay of
urban life, the effect of the closet on lesbian and gay culture,
and - most provocatively - the myriad ways in which gay men and
lesbians are hurt or dismissed by their biological families. Its
main characters are Rita Mae Weems, a lesbian rat exterminator;
David, a gay writer who is living with AIDS; and Killer, a
chronically under-employed woman (and Rita's best friend) who is
newly in love. The book is a mix of somber hysteria and giddy
meditation, and its difficult themes led to Schulman's recent
pessimism...
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By Kate
Sullivan, City Pages
Excerpt:
Speaking on the phone from her
Lower East Side flat, Schulman sounds exhausted. Off the cuff--and
on the page--she's given to large and elegant generalizations,
some more convincing than others. Regardless, Schulman raises
important questions that have been roundly ignored by the
mainstream press. She's given up on pursuing a lawsuit, and
instead has written a yet-unpublished book about (among other
things) Rent and the commodification of queer culture.
CITY PAGES: When did you first
suspect you'd been plagiarized?
SARAH SCHULMAN: It had been six years since my
book was published. I had written four novels, three or four
plays, and hundreds of articles since that time. It was very far
from my mind. Then [operatic librettist] Michael Korie told me
that he had had this discussion with Jonathan Larson in 1994,
where Larson had told him he [was using my book]. I reread the
novel, and I realized that the play was actually two plots: La
Bohème was the straight plot and People In Trouble was
the gay plot, and he had just wound them together. I told my
publisher and they were like, "We don't care." Then [Angels
In America playwright] Tony Kushner got a lawyer to talk to me
for free. I found out that Rent was worth $1 billion, the
movie rights had been bought by Robert De Niro, [and the music by
David Geffen]. In other words, I was up against the most powerful
people in America...
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By Paul Harris, betweenthelinesnews.com
Excerpt:
Every now and again I read a review that says
that this or that book has made a startling contribution to the
discussion on a particular topic only to be disappointed when I
read it to find that I have been - taken in - yet again.
Slowly a sense of cynicism grows... Recently
though I read a book that I think says some really quite profound
things and stopped me in my tracks several times while reading it.
The book in question is Sarah Schulman’s Stage
Struck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.
On the face of it the book tells the story of
how a hard-working lesbian novelist’s work got ripped off and
then altered by a white heterosexual male to misrepresent the
history of AIDS on the Lower East Side. In reality the book
discusses the way in which the ruling group in society - affluent,
white, middle class and male - have homogenized minorities to make
them acceptable and marketable. Not only that, Sarah Schulman goes
on to look at the way in which predominantly gay, white, middle
class men themselves have been a party to this happening...
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Vanessa Baird meets a subversive with a sense of
humour
Excerpt:
‘What’s a lesbian?’ the kids
in one of New York’s most conservative Catholic schools
innocently asked their teacher. The kids were doing what the
balloon they had been given as they came into school that morning
told them to do: ‘Ask about lesbians.’
They had been given the balloons by
a group of Lesbian Avengers, accompanied by a jaunty little band
of musicians in Catholic school uniforms.
The New York education system had
been taken over by conservative Catholics who were seeking to ban
any mention of homosexuality in state schools.
‘So we gave the kids the balloons
knowing they would ask their teacher what a lesbian was,’ Sarah
Schulman, co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers says with a smile...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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