Read an Excerpt from Sarah Schulman’s ‘After Delores’
Author: William Johnson
September 17, 2013
This month, Arsenal Pulp Press is releasing a new edition of Sarah Schulman’s celebrated novel After Delores. Initially published in 1988, this gritty cultural snapshot-cum-mystery novel details the emotional rigors of queer life in downtown New York City in the mid-eighties.
From the publisher:
In this new edition of Sarah Schulman’s acclaimed 1988 novel, the unnamed narrator is a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York’s bohemian Lower East Side who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her for another woman. Over the course of a few days, she goes on the prowl looking for love, only to find herself immersed in a tangled web of seduction, deceit, and murder. Along the way, she meets a diverse array of characters, from Priscilla, a hot femme who leaves behind a tiny, pearl-handled gun, Punkette, a go-go dancer who works lunches in Newark, and Charlotte, a bewitching and brutal actress. This hilarious, unpredictable, sexy novel is a fast-paced flashback to the storefronts, underground clubs, and back alleys of the Lower East Side’s lesbian subculture in the 1980s―an electrifying chronicle of New York life featuring an edgy and totally original heroine.
Includes a new introduction by the author.
Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books: including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works 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 the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers.
Read the new introduction to the novel here.
