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Description
PAPERBACK EDITION
Sarah Schulman's acclaimed dystopian satire about urban mores is set in New York sometime in the future, when the city has morphed into an idealized version of itself: rent is cheap, homelessness is nonexistent, and the only job left is in marketing. But all is not as it seems, when a murder is committed by a prominent New Yorker and the resulting trial transfixes the city. Sparkling with witty and provocative social commentary, The Mere Future is a startingly sharp-eyed prophecy of the world to come. Kessler Award winner Schulman's other books include Rat Bohemia, The Child, Empathy, and Ties that Bind (The New Press).
About the Author
Sarah Schulman is the author of eighteen books: the novels The Cosmopolitans, The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project .
Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
Author photograph by Nayland Blake.
Editorial Reviews
The Mere Future is a utopian-cum-dystopian satire, a collide-oscope of postmodernism, lesbian romance, heterosexual tangles, literature, murder, injustice, art, and the insidious, shifting-yet-never-changing loci of power.
?Event
— Event
In The Mere Future, Sarah Schulman emerges as a unique voice in speculative fiction.
?East Bay Express
— East Bay Express
A novel of biting satire and sharp humour which presents us with the dreadfully recognizable scenario of how lives are lived under the reign of a corporate behemoth that has reached deep into the consciousness and desires of its characters' lives.
?Canadian Woman Studies
— Canadian Woman Studies
The Mere Future is an intelligently written satire ... Excellently crafted prose, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.
?New York Journal of Books
— New York Journal of Books
Schulman's humor is painfully sharp, her sarcasm sharper, and her intellect sharpest of all. If you play with her, she'll show you some things you probably didn't want - but needed - to know.
?Liberty Press
— Liberty Press
Clever word craft, poetic political satire and biting humor on every page.
?Publishers Weekly
Schulman injects wry political commentary and sly cultural satire into her intellectually dynamic plot with infectious constancy.
?Richard Labonte, Book Marks
Shockingly of the moment ... The Mere Future is set a few years hence "when things are slightly better because there has been a big change," and, as she always does, Schulman fashions a writing style that suits the setting ... [This] is probably Schulman's funniest book.
? Lambda Book Report
