Rat Bohemia won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was named one of the "100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time" by the US Publishing Triangle. This new edition includes a brand new introduction by the author.

Set in contemporary New York City, Rat Bohemia is the story of Rita Mae Weems, a woman from Queens who works as a rat exterminator for the NYC Department of Health's Pest Control Division. As she battles cuts to the budget for extermination and streetlights, her best friend, Killer, a career plant-waterer, is busy falling in love with the rakish and enigmatic Troy Ruby. And David, a writer who is HIV-positive, struggles to be truthful about the Aids experience even as his family averts their eyes from his day-to-day efforts to stay alive.

Through Rita, David, and Killer, Schulman traces the very particular and very devastating ways that gay poeple are abandoned by their families - a subject that has not yet found its way into the public discussion about Aids - and the enormously creative and courageous ways in which gay men and lesbians lead their lives despite this loss. With her usual energetic wit, fresh style and defiant honesty, Schulman has given us, in Rat Bohemia, the ultimate fin de siecle novel - one that is certain to provoke readers, generate controversy, and give us further reason to work for hope and healing.

240 pages

Publisher Comments:
"More persuasively than any other contemporary novelist, Sarah Schulman traces the ways in which the disenfranchisement that begins as a political evil pervades every aspect of life, from the metaphysical and spiritual to the most intimate moments of two people together."-Tony Kushner

"My surrender to Rat Bohemiais a testimonial to its gimlet-eyed accuracy, its zero-degree honesty. . . . [It blows] the traditional novel off its hinges."-Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

Sarah Schulman is the author of 11 books and lives in New York. As a journalist her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Awards.

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