About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Robert Gluck
Positive The New York Times Book Review The result interweaves elements of biography, memoir, psychotherapy, philosophy and confession. Glück’s long struggle to write this book remains palpable in its fragmented structure ... Glück writes through digression, in conversation with the inevitable and the unknown at once. This is a stylistic choice, but also a method of opening up the text: Each paragraph becomes a living, growing thing, pushing in all direction.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Rave The New York Times The novel’s greatest innovation may be the way its disparate subjects fashion a collective we of lesbian world-making and feminist activation. This we transcends time and place; it can maneuver both inside and outside history, in opposition to the forward march of misogyny and patriarchy, war and marginalization. \'Some acts can only be written as fragments,\' Schwartz writes. Her story, in kind, forms and re-forms itself through fragments... which float between and beyond boundaries ... 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.
Paul Lisicky
Positive San Francisco Chronicle Later is not a conventional memoir. The book consists of 34 numbered, untitled chapters ... It’s as if a diary has been turned inside out ... it’s his pared-down episodic structure that allows for a careful spontaneity suspending time ... he manages to speak of longing and loss and craving and stasis and flailing and sobbing and laughing and cracking, all amid a persistent search for beauty and connection.
Sarah Schulman
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle What had been a fairly straightforward historical novel becomes a comedy of manners, a morality play, a musical-in-waiting, an instructional film about the emergent advertising industry, an investigation of the romance of the city, and a cautionary tale. Every scene is meticulously choreographed, overwrought in its use of direct address, just like the plays that Bette and Earl are constantly discussing ... The Cosmopolitans shimmers where it departs from the conventions of realism to indict not just structural homophobia, racism and misogyny but also the structures of writing that further these societal ills. Schulman accomplishes all this with deadpan humor and startling precision.