Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings (Bantam Classics)

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Known primarily for her classic and haunting story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an enormously influential American feminist and sociologist. Her early-twentieth-century writings continue to inspire writers and activists today. This collection includes selections from both her fiction and nonfiction work.

In addition to the title story, there are seven short stories collected here that combine humor, anger, and startling vision to suggest how women's "place" in society should be changed to benefit all. The nonfiction selections are from Gilman's The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture and her masterpiece, Women And Economics, which was translated into seven languages and established her international reputation as a theorist.

Also included in a delightful excerpt from Gilman's utopian novel,Herland, an acidly funny tale about three American male explorers who stumble into an all-female society and begin their odyssey by insisting, "This is a civilized country . . . there must be men." Gilman's analyses of economic and women's issues are as incisive and relevant today as they were upon their original publication. This volume is an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover a powerful American writer.

Copies

Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Since Marco Polo’s explorations and Montaigne’s travels, a lively dialogue has persisted about travel’s pros and cons — its excitement, novelties, perils, and misadventures. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises serious and amusing questions.
Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel shaped her. She visits Miami Beach as an adolescent with an aunt and uncle and confronts the sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses acute political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to their own startling realizations.
In this memoir, Schwartz’s history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she does. Her story exemplifies a mode of travel: the mind on a journey, pausing, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, backtracking, but always on the move.

Copies

No copies available.

Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Ever since the explorations of Marco Polo and the travels of Montaigne, a lively dialogue has persisted about the pros and cons of travel. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises both serious and amusing questions about travel, using her own experiences as vivid illustrations.

Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. She makes an adolescent visit to Miami Beach, where she confronts the powerful sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to startling realizations of their own.

Schwartz’s personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows us who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, this memoir exemplifies a mode of travel in and of itself: the mind on a journey or quest, pausing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.

Copies

No copies available.

The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

In a tale of emotional survival in post-9/11 New York City, thirty-four-year-old Renata deals with the effects of the bombings on her personal life, in light of the trauma she has already experienced.

Copies

No copies available.

Disturbances in the Field: A Novel

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

As powerful now as when first published in 1983, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s third novel established her as one of her generation’s most assured writers. In this long-awaited reissue, readers can again warm to this acutely absorbing story.According to Lydia Rowe’s friend George, a philosophizing psychotherapist, a "disturbance in the field" is anything that keeps us from realizing our needs. In the field of daily experiences, anything can stand in the way of our fulfillment, he explains—an interrupting phone call, an unanswered cry. But over time we adjust and new needs arise. But what if there’s a disturbance you can’t get past? In this look at a girl’s, then a wife and mother’s, coming of age, Schwartz explores the questions faced by all whose visions of a harmonious existence are jolted into disarray. The result is a novel of captivating realism and lasting grace.

Copies

No copies available.

Referred Pain: And Other Stories

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Lynn Sharon Schwartz

In this collection of stories, the characters live seemingly ordinary lives, but, with attention to the nuances of language, their perversions and subversions are revealed with wit and acuity, sometimes in the surreal realm of fantasy. 30,000 first printing.

Copies

No copies available.

Referred Pain: And Other Stories

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Lynn Sharon Schwartz

Everyone has a face that they show to the outside world--but our thoughts, fears, and perversions lie just beneath.
"Referred pain" describes the sensation of pain, not at the actual point of injury, but somewhere else in the body. This disorientation of the senses is felt, in one way or another, by many of the characters in this collection from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, one of America's foremost chroniclers of contemporary life.
In the title novella, a son of Holocaust survivors circumvents his discomfort over his parents' history through a Kafkaesque series of dental procedures. In another story, a professor's sexual attraction to one of his students leads him down a twisted path of misplaced identity. Laced with Schwartz's satirical, acidly intelligent wit, Referred Pain displays the peak of her ability.

Copies

No copies available.

Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays about Translation

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

Copies

No copies available.

Two-Part Inventions: A Novel

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists. Syncing the alterations seamlessly, he created a piece of flawless music with Suzanne getting sole credit.

In this urban, psychological novel, author Lynne Sharon Schwartz brilliantly guides the reader through a flawed marriage and calculated career. Beginning with Suzanne’s death and moving backwards in time, Schwartz examines their life together, and her remarkable career, while contemplating the nature of truth, marriage and the pursuit of perfection.

Copies

No copies available.

Two-Part Inventions: A Novel

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists. Syncing the alterations seamlessly, he created a piece of flawless music with Suzanne getting sole credit.

In this urban, psychological novel, author Lynne Sharon Schwartz brilliantly guides the reader through a flawed marriage and calculated career. Beginning with Suzanne’s death and moving backwards in time, Schwartz examines their life together, and her remarkable career, while contemplating the nature of truth, marriage and the pursuit of perfection.

Copies

No copies available.

Crossing Borders Stories and Essays about Translation

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

A collection of stories and essays about translating and translators

"What an astonishing collection, it seemed as if I could drink it--these pieces exude such humanness, refer effortlessly to the tender place that exists in between languages, and somehow leave you with both everything and nothing to say." --Ella Frances Sanders, author of Lost in Translation

In Joyce Carol Oates's story "The Translation," a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis's "French Lesson I: Le Meurtre," what begins as a lesson in beginner's French takes a sinister turn. In the essay "On Translating and Being Translated," Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation.

Copies

No copies available.

See You in the Dark Poems

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

An acclaimed novelist, essayist, memoirist, and translator, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has written that she began writing "before [she] knew about the strictures of literary genres: poem, story, essay." What she wrote as a child was "poetic speculation . . . partaking of all the genres and bounded by none." It is not surprising, then, that her facility with, and love of, language and speculation are on display in her new collection of poetry, See You in the Dark.

Despite her indifference to genre, Schwartz takes a profound delight in poetic forms, appropriating the sonnet, the prose poem, and the envoi. She brings an easygoing musicality to her work, which ranges from parodic translations of Verlaine to instructions for making the perfect soup to a meditation on an Ecstasy trip. No artificial line between high and low culture divides Schwartz's world: she is equally intrigued by the metaphor of gardening, the work of artist Jenny Holzer, the bandits Frank and Jesse James (maybe distant relatives of Henry and William?), and the unintentional poetry of Craigslist's "missed connection" section.

Filled with wisdom, humor, and deep insight, See You in the Dark is poetry for readers not bounded by genre.

Copies

No copies available.

No Way Out but Through (Pitt Poetry Series)

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

“One marvels at the force of seeing in Schwartz’s No Way Out But Through and cannot help but feel a particular gratitude for her abundant humor. Go all in with these poems; you'll reap unknown rewards. She possesses a quick-witted imagination that sanctifies memories and makes room for the wondrous nature of our cosmopolitan lights.”
—Major Jackson

Copies

No copies available.