After Sappho

JACOB BROGAN, THE WASHINGTON POST

"After Sappho accomplishes what only the most generous art can: It makes a more perfect world out of the imperfections of our own ... The result is not quite narrative fiction and not quite history either. It is, however, a work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams ... This novel consists in just such a marshaling of shards. As Schwartz fictionalizes the real bonds between real women, she invites us to imagine a still more sprawling network of lovers and ways of loving, a whole world that never quite existed but that, in these pages, always has."

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The novel's greatest innovation may be the way its disparate subjects fashion a collective we of lesbian world-making and feminist activation. This we transcends time and place; it can maneuver both inside and outside history, in opposition to the forward march of misogyny and patriarchy, war and marginalization. 'Some acts can only be written as fragments,' Schwartz writes. Her story, in kind, forms and re-forms itself through fragments... which float between and beyond boundaries ... The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse for certainty or linear cohesion. She draws from history in order to reimagine it."