Maggie Terry

This novel was born out of twenty years of Sarah Schulman teaching writing to police, including Rikers Island corrections officers, Port Authority-stationed cops, and others, and their classroom discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement and controversial killings of black citizens. One of the most important plotlines within the novel deals with individual NYPD members’ attempts to reconcile with these issues.
Maggie Terry is Sarah Schulman’s first pulp novel since 1988’s cult classic After Delores. In Maggie Terry, Schulman returns to the themes, people, and places that have made her books to beloved-downtown New York City, hardboiled and no-nonsense female characters, complicated explorations of queer relationships-this time, with a slick murder-mystery twist. Set in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Schulman explores how social unrest and the rise of political protest affects those largely forgotten or ignored by mainstream media narratives. The title character has missed Donald Trump’s elecion due to rehabilitation, and tries to rejoin a world with a drastically changed set of newshooks and headlines. This is Feminist Press’s second book with Sarah Schulman. As the publisher of her previous novel The Cosmopolitans, we have already established relationships with editors and reviewers who are interested in Schulman’s work, and are well-posed to follow up on that interest.