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    The Cosmopolitans
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    The Cosmopolitans
    Unavailable
    The Cosmopolitans
    Ebook367 pages4 hours

    The Cosmopolitans

    By Sarah Schulman

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A modern retelling of Balzac's classic Cousin Bette by one of America's most prolific and significant writers. Earl, a black, gay actor working in a meatpacking plant, and Bette, a white secretary, have lived next door to each other in the same Greenwich Village apartment building for thirty years. Shamed and disowned by their familied, both found refuge in New York and in their domestic routine. Everything changes when Hortense, a wealthy young actress from Ohio, comes to the city to "make it." Textured with the grit and gloss of midcentury Manhattan, The Cosmopolitans is a lush, inviting read. The truths it frames about the human need for love and recognition remain long after the book is closed.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Feminist Press at CUNY
    Release dateFeb 22, 2016
    ISBN9781558619050
    Unavailable
    The Cosmopolitans
    Author

    Sarah Schulman

    Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

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    Reviews for The Cosmopolitans

    4.5/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is just brilliant! I am over the moon. Seriously. The writing is among the most beautiful I have read, and it is a rarity to find such a thing coming off press in 2016. I found it similar in style to James Baldwin's work, and the characters similar in depth. It wasn't until later in the book when I started to find find references to Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and then, upon finishing, I found out that Sarah Schulman has indeed been heavily influenced by Baldwin's writing. The friendship between main characters, Bette and Earl, spans thirty years from the 1920's through 1950's and the reader is taken on a beautiful, intense journey as the unlikely pair struggle with their feelings, desires, and personal identities. The setting is as though Schulman was living it herself, and I couldn't have seen it more vividly.The Cosmopolitans is a retelling of Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, which I have not had the pleasure of reading. From what I have read on it, however, Cousin Bette is a story of violent jealousy, sexual passion, and treachery. Sarah Schulman's retelling includes all of that, as well as dealing with some very difficult issues that were not only true in the time, but still relevant today.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this—an odd omniscient narrator book, based on Balzac's [Cousin Bette], but very engaging. I liked the characters' combination of extreme perceptiveness and extreme selfishness, which made for a neat kind of social-realism-on-the-couch storytelling. It was actually the perfect book to read right after Elizabeth Taylor, with the British drawing room transplanted to late-1950s Greenwich Village with some race relations thrown in. Schulman's epilogue was interesting too, talking a bit about Zola and dirty realism and literary movements.The cover reminds me so much of a Dawn Powell book but I can't remember which. Maybe The Golden Spur.I was sorry not to bring it home with me from the conference I was at in Orlando, but I was greedy and picked up too many galleys and couldn't quite see bringing a galley that I'd already read home again in my already overloaded suitcase. So I set it free into the wild of the Rosen Centre lobby, which was full of librarians this morning, with a note; hopefully someone else (who didn't pick up as many galleys as I did) will dig it.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book. It’s the story of two lonely people, one a white female who fled her small town life in Ohio and the other a black gay man who fled his family in the south. They’ve lived side by side in different apartments since they met. He’s a struggling actor, forced to take a job in a slaughterhouse. She has a mundane job as a secretary in an advertising firm. Their New York City story spans the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s and their friendship is responsible for their survival. If a story could be called “beautiful” that’s what I’d call this book.