AFTER SAPPHO – Selby Wynn Schwartz

“Those were the stories we were given.  When we were children, we learned what happened to girls in fables: eaten, married, lost. Then came our bouts of classical education, imparting to us the fates of women in ancient literature: betrayed, raped, cast out, driven mad in tongueless grief.” My Booker 2022 longlist reading journey isContinue reading “AFTER SAPPHO – Selby Wynn Schwartz”

PLAIN BAD HEROINES – Emily M. Danforth

I don’t DNF (Do/Did Not Finish) books for assorted reasons.  (I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve abandoned after starting, and they still haunt me.)  A few hundred pages into Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (Harper Collins 2020), I wanted to stop.  I had such high hopes for this sapphicContinue reading “PLAIN BAD HEROINES – Emily M. Danforth”

RADIANT FUGITIVES – Nawaaz Ahmed

“My mother’s name is Seema. Which means face, something of her I will never see, or frontier, something I must leave behind.” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Nawaaz Ahmed’s debut novel Radiant Fugitives (Counterpoint Press, 2021).  I’d read a blurb months before publication in a failed attempt to get an advanced copy,Continue reading “RADIANT FUGITIVES – Nawaaz Ahmed”