Empathy:

by Sarah Schulman

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525935215
• Release Date: December 1992
• Publisher: Dutton
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.7" x 0.9" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

I 've re-read it at least 8 times over the years.

Aside from being one of the funniest books I've ever read, it has a special quality: Certain paragraphs will spring out at me and I'll think: "I've always wanted the words to describe that kind of feeling or circumstance, and there on the page are the perfect words." I tend to devalue words as having little effect on the world, but reading Empathy reminds me that good writers can keep people alive when their sense of reality is questioned so brutally by the mainstream world. This book feels like my bible more than any thing else. And it has many funny moments in it. Oh . . . there were also paragraphs where I didn't have a clue what she was talking about.... Still, all in all, my favorite book of all this decade.

Funny, witty, real

Maybe one of the most intricate and elaborate work about identity I have ever read. Sarah Schulman's writing makes us dive into a historical pool of events and questions each and every one of us have experienced in our own special moments.

Complex and unique

She uses formal invention to evoke (not describe) what lesbian life is like.When I took her writing class here at UCSD, I realized how sophisticated her writing is. Before that I think this book got overlooked because people think that novels about lesbians can't be art.