"[A] brilliant debut novel... The collective first-person “we” narrator―a Greek chorus devoted to the female poet Sappho―weaves the stories of writers, painters, and performers who, like Sappho, are attracted to women and are determined to become their authentic selves through art.... As the chorus narrates, 'we were plunged back into a history we had barely survived the first time.' Schwartz’s account of what happens next as the central characters resist oppression speaks volumes on their efforts, and she contributes her own work of art with this irresistible narrative. Schwartz breathes an astonishing sense of life into her timeless characters."
― Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This book dares to invent a new form, one that embraces the maddening fragmentation of so many important women in history and reclaims it as a kind of revolutionary beauty. An exciting, luxurious work of speculative biography."
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"After Sappho considers the intimate moments beyond historical record, shifting our gaze and questioning the discipline of history itself. Schwartz builds a novel around women’s struggles for self-determination, excising the men who were in their way. For the most part, these men simply do not appear in the book at all. The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse for certainty or linear cohesion. She draws from history in order to reimagine it. 'Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future?' Schwartz asks. 'She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments.'"
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, New York Times
"A brilliant debut . . . In passages often recalling the sensuous prose of Ali Smith, After Sappho tracks not just outer movement, but psychological ambulation, picking up on the subtlest shifts in mood with the delicacy of a weathervane . . . a ravishing mosaic of creative subjectivity and self-fashioning."
― Rhoda Feng, NPR
"Words can be an incantation; the right verse can summon desire and a depth of feeling that can seem at odds with the quiet act of reading. Heart rates can rise as readers quietly turn the page, changing even as they remain still. A good phrase can unleash something inside a person; it can unearth and provoke. In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel 'After Sappho', long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize in fiction, the verses of the sixth-century BCE Greek poet do all this and so much more.... Selby Wynn Schwartz writes beautiful prose, with a keen eye toward the playfulness of grammar and the joy of language. This is a book to be consumed slowly, to be savored like a glorious sunset even as it screams the inevitability of night. 'After Sappho' is an incantation against the darkness and a call to the light, however fragmented it may be."
― Adriana E. Ramírez, Boston Globe
"Long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, this time-leaping novel connects a pantheon of queer literary titans ― Sappho! Oscar Wilde! Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West! ― with one muse. This book reads as if it’s skipping: full of movement, lightness, and whimsical defiance."
― Maggie Lange, Bustle
"Desire, art and politics lead the dance in After Sappho . . . a mesmerising, uplifting and most inspiring novel. It’s a great literary achievement. As we tangle across time with the dazzling female artists who are its reimagined historical subjects (from Sappho to Virginia Woolf), we understand that we are connected in our transhistoric longings to live more audaciously, more fully, closer to ourselves."
― Deborah Levy, New Statesman, "Best Books of 2022"
