Top 10 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:

The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Traversing The Silk Road involves moving simultaneously through many layers. It is much like our lives on this planet, where the permafrost is melting but we also fall in love, where plagues stalk the land but somebody also needs to make dinner. The novel is peopled by an endearingly mortal set of siblings – it’s the Cook who obligingly makes dinner, the Archivist who goes weak with love, the Topologist who leaves her guidebook on a cafe table – and it is set in a mystical limbo of landscapes. This is a beguiling novel of journeys beyond individual selfhood.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue