Provocative, observant, and daring, this 1992 novel by one of America's preeminent lesbian writers and thinkers is being reissued for the Little Sister's Classics series. Anna O. is a loner in New York, an office temp obsessed with a mysterious woman in white leather; Doc is a post-Freudian psychiatrist who hands out business cards to likely neurotics on street corners, and is looking for his own personal fulfillment. They befriend each other in the netherworld of the Lower East Side, two unlikely people drawn together by their confusion about and empathy for the world around them and each other. This beautifully written novel is about the fluidity of desire, and how those of us damaged by love can still be transformed by it.

With an introduction by Kevin Killian, a novelist, poet, critic and playwright and the author of Argento Series, I Cry Like a Baby, Shy, and Bedrooms Have Windows, amongst others. He lives in San Francisco.

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

Kevin Killian is a San Francisco novelist, poet, art writer, critic and playwright.

Kevin Killian's profile page

Insightful . . . funny . . . makes provocative statements about gender roles, sexual orientation, aids, homelessness, drugs, and the therapeutic value of an attentive ear.
?Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

With Empathy, the lesbian novel comes of age.
?Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon