This week we welcome Booker-longlisted Selby Wynn Schwartz, whose debut novel After Sappho is a fountain of fleeting fragments that together depict in lush psychical detail the lives of a group of lesbian women in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe. Except Selby Wynn Schwartz does not just tell the story of these women, or even retell it, but—inspired by the splintered remains of Sappho’s poetry—reinvents the very form of the novel, turning it into something more diffuse, more choric and more radical.

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Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives, a 2020 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, Lammergeier, and Passages North; her first novella, A Life in Chameleons, won the 2021 Reflex Press Novella.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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