Sarah Schulman

This was a fascinating and by turns gorgeous and humanly frustrating; the characters are so, sometimes painfully real, and Schulman manages to render every character in stark light. The titular Maggie Terry's struggle through not just her addiction but a whole new reality on the other side of rehab, a new world full of gentrification and loss of love as well as the troubling past of her career as a cop, really strips bare the consequences of refusing to talk to one another, on all sides--and show more while that in its more trope forms I know can be a turnoff for many readers, in this case it's so painfully realistic that it's not Plot Convenient but more just... how people are when they're traumatized and socialized in a world that so rarely allows for honest conversation. Definitely recommend. show less

This book is just brilliant! I am over the moon. Seriously. The writing is among the most beautiful I have read, and it is a rarity to find such a thing coming off press in 2016. I found it similar in style to James Baldwin's work, and the characters similar in depth. It wasn't until later in the book when I started to find find references to Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and then, upon finishing, I found out that Sarah Schulman has indeed been heavily influenced by Baldwin's writing.
The show more friendship between main characters, Bette and Earl, spans thirty years from the 1920's through 1950's and the reader is taken on a beautiful, intense journey as the unlikely pair struggle with their feelings, desires, and personal identities. The setting is as though Schulman was living it herself, and I couldn't have seen it more vividly.
The Cosmopolitans is a retelling of Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, which I have not had the pleasure of reading. From what I have read on it, however, Cousin Bette is a story of violent jealousy, sexual passion, and treachery. Sarah Schulman's retelling includes all of that, as well as dealing with some very difficult issues that were not only true in the time, but still relevant today. show less

I really enjoyed this—an odd omniscient narrator book, based on Balzac's [Cousin Bette], but very engaging. I liked the characters' combination of extreme perceptiveness and extreme selfishness, which made for a neat kind of social-realism-on-the-couch storytelling. It was actually the perfect book to read right after Elizabeth Taylor, with the British drawing room transplanted to late-1950s Greenwich Village with some race relations thrown in. Schulman's epilogue was interesting too, show more talking a bit about Zola and dirty realism and literary movements.

The cover reminds me so much of a Dawn Powell book but I can't remember which. Maybe The Golden Spur.

I was sorry not to bring it home with me from the conference I was at in Orlando, but I was greedy and picked up too many galleys and couldn't quite see bringing a galley that I'd already read home again in my already overloaded suitcase. So I set it free into the wild of the Rosen Centre lobby, which was full of librarians this morning, with a note; hopefully someone else (who didn't pick up as many galleys as I did) will dig it. show less

I read this book after hearing Shulman speak with Sam Sanders on It's Been a Minute. The history she reveals here is inspiring, agonizing, and deeply human. By using oral histories and letting the ACT UP activists speak for themselves Shulman creates immediacy and urgency. This book covers my 5th-12th grade years, and while I was aware of AIDS and ACT UP neither were part of my everyday life. Having this lens into this time, and a primer on the possibilities of creative, purposeful activism, show more is truly powerful. I appreciated hearing Shulman's voice throughout as well. She doesn't center herself in the narrative, but she doesn't erase herself either. This model of journalism contributes to my overall sense of the book as being, beyond any specific content, human and humane. show less