Chicanes

Through a subtly crafted chorus of female voices from Edith Wharton to bell hooks, to Schulmann's contemporaries, Clara Schulmann blurs the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women's words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann's life - heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. Like weeds, like bad seeds, these wayward words invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure. Sinuous, evocative and timely, CHICANES reveals Clara Schulmann as an author whose own voice is going to hold weight in years to come. In a further fine-tuning of Clara Schulmann's experiment, her work comes into English through the work of eight female translators.