People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

Overview

'A book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago' Olivia Laing

First published in 1990, discover this blistering novel about a love triangle in New York during the AIDS crisis. The perfect novel to read after bingeing It's A Sin.

It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away.

It is the late 1980s. Kate, an ambitious artist, lives in Manhattan with her husband Peter. She's having an affair with Molly, a younger lesbian who works part-time in a movie theater.

At one of many funerals during an unbearably hot summer, Molly becomes involved with a guerrilla activist group fighting for people with AIDS. But Kate is more cautious, and Peter is bewildered by the changes he's seeing in his city and, most crucially, in his wife.

Soon the trio learn how tragedy warps even the closest relationships, and that anger - and its absence - can make the difference between life and death.

'Strong, nervy and challenging' New York Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473568549
Publisher:	Random House
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter and AIDS historian. She is the author of 19 books. Her awards include a Guggenheim in Playwrighting and a Fulbright in Judaic Studies. With Jim Hubbard she is co-founder of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, The ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org) and co-producer of the film UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP.

Sarah is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice In Palestine at The College of Staten Island where she is a Distinguished Professor.

Editorial Reviews

In a witty, angry and anguished novel, set in an almost-real contemporary New York City, Kate and Molly are having an affair. Kate, an artist, still loves husband Peter and wants the two parts of her love life to somehow peacefully coexist. They won't--Peter feels jealous; Molly, neglected. The triangle is played out as AIDS kills hundreds; homelessness and hunger are as ubiquitous as Ronald Horne, a cold-blooded, homophobic real-estate mogul with political aspirations. At the end of their ropes, the AIDS activists who constitute the group Justice decide that they've got nothing to lose. Molly first, then Kate, become involved in Justice's inventive schemes of civil disobedience. At times lapsing into melodrama, Schulman ( After Delores ) carefully balances the story lines, using Kate's own sexual awareness and awakening as a benchmark for the situation of the besieged homosexual community. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

AIDS is a metaphor for ``the beginning of the end of the world'' in this dark gay-lesbian novel about Kate, a married artist dabbling in lesbian sex, Molly, her lesbian/activist lover, and Peter, Kate's Yuppie scene designer husband, who is confused by not only his wife's increasing interest in the gay world, but by the increasing gayness of the world itself. They play out their story in a futuristic New York City, where a radical gay group robs banks to help AIDS patients. Though Schulman has talent, the sophisticated, New York flavor of the book and the often inaccessibility of the characters leave little for many readers to identify with, and the graphic gay sex scenes may be offensive to conservative audiences. Nevertheless, Schulman creates a disturbing picture of the plight of humanity and our seeming indifference, a theme which cuts across strictly gay borders. For larger collections with demand for gay/lesbian literature.-- Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Cty. Free Libs., Seaside, Cal.

Library Journal

"Deeply original fiction...Part of the power of the apocolyptic vision she has created here, of course, is that it's one from which no one is safe, no one exempt." -- Madamoiselle

Joyce Maynard