Empathy

Provocative, observant, and daring, this 1992 novel by one of America’s preeminent lesbian writers and thinkers is being reissued for the Little Sister’s Classics series. Anna O. is a loner in New York, an office temp obsessed with a mysterious woman in white leather; Doc is a post-Freudian psychiatrist who hands out business cards to likely neurotics on street corners, and is himself looking for personal fulfillment. They befriend each other in the netherworld of the Lower East Side, two unlikely people drawn together by their confusion about and empathy for the world around them, and each other. This beautifully written novel is about the fluidity of desire, and how those of us damaged by love can still be transformed by it. Features a new essay by the author and an introduction by Kevin Killian.

The award-winning author of After Delores writes a novel that probes the questions of sexual identity, self-renewal, and transformation. An office temp's journey of self-discovery culminates when she meets another woman whose essential BOMC Selection.

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

Publishers Weekly

Lesbian writer Schulman follows her well-received After Delores and People in Trouble with this insightful allegory, which explores the feminine and masculine qualities said to coexist within every personality. The novel is prefaced by a troubling quote from Freud, which alleges that lesbianism results from a woman's frustrated Elektra complex and desire to punish her father. This theory is challenged by protagonist Anna O (meant to suggest a famous Freud patient), a lesbian secure in her attraction to women yet struggling with male sexism, her family's homophobia and her feelings that she is unlovable. Anna consults ``street-corner psychiatrist'' Doc, who roams New York's Lower East Side and charges patients $10 an hour for his listening skills. Representing the female and male halves of a complete person, Anna and Doc discover that together they can confront conventional mores, their own guilt and a woman, symbolically clad in white leather, who broke their hearts. In a resolution that better serves the book's allegorical aims than its dramatic development, Anna and Doc are composites that masquerade as characters. In a plain-spoken, often funny narrative, Schulman makes provocative statements about gender roles, sexual orientation, AIDS, homelessness, drugs and the therapeutic value of an attentive ear. Author tour. (Dec.)

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.