Sarah Schulman's surprising novel about a brokenhearted waitress looking for love in New York's Lower East Side.

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.

I remember watching her against the eerie glare of headlights knowing that I was the person Delores cared about the most. Now I'm the one she most wants to break. I guess that means I know her inside out. That's why I can't let go. Something organic keeps her right there, next to me. Whenever I move, she follows me because Delores left everything unresolved and that was a dirty trick.

Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books: the novels 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 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, 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 at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
Author photograph by Nayland Blake.

Sarah Schulman's profile page

A rare, insightful look into the lesbian mind ... as for Delores, everybody knows her. She is someone unworthy of your love, who breaks your heart.
?New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

This novel is as personal as any lyric poem.
?Kathy Acker, Village Voice

Village Voice

Hilarious, hard-core ... makes Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero seem thin and dated.
?Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

After Delores is entertaining and exciting, with beautifully constructed prose and observation ... This is a journey worth taking, evoking and exploring the universal truths of lust, love, anger, remorse, and loss -- sometimes all at once. “Broken Pencil

Broken Pencil