The Fatigue Artist is a refreshingly candid story about life, love, and survival in the contemporary world. A writer living in New York City, Laura is overwhelmed by a mysterious lethargy and retreats to her bed where she reflects on the loves and losses of her recent past and seeks the cure to her perplexing tiredness.
Fortified by the Eastern teachings of her Tai Chi instructor and the nurturing attentions of friends and a acupuncturist, Laura crawls out of her somnambulism with intelligent determination in search of peace and resurrection. The Fatigue Artist is both a...

For the first time, one of New York City's major resident authors spins a breathtakingly immediate, intimate family novel set around the September 11th attacks. Thirty-four and decidedly independent, Renata has been known to keep her involvement with people - men in particular - to a minimum. Even her job at the library keeps her at a remove from the uncertainty of trusting other people with the stories of her past. Instead, she loses herself in language, always measuring the integrity of words against lived experience. Then Jack, patient, solid and sexy, enters her life. One bright September...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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"