Empathy

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Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006 - Fiction - 220 pages

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 looking for his own 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.

With an introduction by Kevin Killian, a novelist, poet, critic and playwright and the author of Argento Series, I Cry Like a Baby, Shy, and Bedrooms Have Windows, amongst others. He lives in San Francisco.

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About the author (2006)

Sarah Schulman is the author of eighteen books: the novels Maggie Terry, The Cosmopolitans, The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project.Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publishing Triangle, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow a Kevin Killian is a San Francisco novelist, poet, art writer, critic and playwright.

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