Top ten experimental feminist books

Selby Wynn Schwartz holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and the forthcoming novella A Life in Chameleons.

Her new novel After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century.

At the Guardian Schwartz tagged ten "21st-century experimental feminist books that inspire" her, including:

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

This is such a profound and intelligent book that you don’t expect a section titled Dream House as Stoner Comedy. But it is also a book that knows how to pick up cliches, worn-out genres, and the concept of memoir itself, in order to dismantle them all in prismatic sections. Looking back on the abuse she has survived, Machado reflects on the complexities of being a queer woman in the midst of stories that are already so established, so inadequate; she invents her own meta-genre of telling a life.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue