BOOKS
Flower Children
The children run free all day, climb apple trees, ride ponies, press their faces into showers of leaves, rub mud all over their bodies and sit out in the sun to let it dry. When their parents invite other adults for skinny-dipping in the creek, the children memorize all the body parts to discuss among themselves. Begun as a widely celebrated short story that announced a captivating new literary voice, Flower Children is a funny, heartrending novel about four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, the offspring of devout hippies.
“Hypnotic. . . Swann's writing is mesmerizing . . . readers won't soon forget the portraits of flower children struggling to bloom in a very different world from the one in which they were first planted.”
--People (four stars, Critic's Choice)
“Swann has created a gem of a novel, a novel that showcases her eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time.”
--The New York Times
Serious Girls
In Serious Girls, sixteen year olds Maya and Roe form an intense friendship when they find themselves cast as outsiders at an all girls boarding school. Sharing their life stories, and curiosity about the adult world, they wonder how they might become «people» with style and character as opposed to school girls. When they move beyond the enclosed world of the school to experience the city, and relationships with men, both girls test the line between an emerging sense of self and its total disintegration.
“With sensitivity and quiet wit, O. Henry Award-winner Swann delineates the turmoil of adolescence…Wonderfully perceptive and precise about an age that’s too often portrayed in vague generalities.” –Kirkus
“Swann’s promising debut is a delicate, clear-eyed distillation of teenage girls’ greatest concerns: identity, authenticity, and sexual power.”
--Entertainment Weekly
The Foreigners
In The Foreigners, three women experience an awakening in the gloriously conflicted city of Buenos Aires: Daisy, an American divorcèe, Isolde, a beautiful, lonely Austrian and Vera, a Ukrainian mother who has escaped a dark reality in her own country. Against the backdrop of this shimmering and decadent city – almost a character in itself – Maxine Swann has created a glittering narrative of compulsive desire that simultaneously explores with remarkable acuity what it means and how it feels to be foreign.
"With lyricism and observational skill that recalls early Joan Didion, Swann brings Buenos Aires to life."
--Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Swann, an American who has lived in Buenos Aires for the past decade, vividly evokes the city and its lively, diverse, and conflicted social landscape, from the denizens of posh hotels to the unfortunate poor living in the city's slums. . . . Seductively hard to put down."
--The Boston Globe
FILMS & TV
When We Were Kings
Feature Documentary (in progress)
A group of drag kings meet up in the woods. They are at a crisis point: stars on the Buenos Aires underground cabaret circuit, they’ve just been cancelled. To make matters worse, one of their members, Sandro King, is dying, gradually transforming back into female form. The king known as Chaman narrates the story in a Voice Off that walks the line between his female creator and the masculine persona she has invented. Chaman is especially affected by the changes in Sandro King, his mentor and model: “Is this all over now?” he asks. “If Sandro King dies, will I die, too?”
Lumiton Incentive Prize from FIDBA, Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires, 2024
Director:
Maxine Swann
Performers:
Maruja Bustamante
Bel Gatti
Dalila Serebrinsky
Eva Mateos
Maxine Swann
Ana Gabriela Taraujo
Camera:
Renata Juncadella
Paz Elduayen
Julia Lucesole
Marco Rossi
Amir Kalim
Lola Dacal
Vareila Mairanga
Editing &
Sound Design:
Emi Castañeda
Fourteen Poems
Short Film
The director sets out to free herself from a troubled relationship in her past that has, in many ways, determined the course of her life. She assembles the pieces and performs a re-enactment.
Mar del Plata International Film Festival, 2023 (Argentina), Maine International Film Festival, 2024 (USA), Filmar en América Latina Genève, 2024 (Switzerland), VAEFF Honorable Mention, 2024 (USA), Asterisco Film Festival Mention, 2024 (Argentina), Storie Parallele Film Festival, 2024 (Italy), Festival PLAY Videoarte y Cine Experimental, 2024 (Argentina), FAN Neuquén, 2024 (Argentina), Phoenix Film Festival, 2025 (USA), Fargo Film Festival, 2025 (USA)
Director:
Maxine Swann
Performers:
Anahí Ojeda
Maxine Swann
Camera:
Vareila Mairanga
Editing:
Maxine Swann
Vareila Mairanga
Editing Finish
& Sound Design:
Emi Castañeda
Sound Mixer:
Ana Laura Castro Borsani
Graphic Designer:
Esteban Favaro
ARTICLES
Why I Dress (and Act) Like a Man,
The New York Times, Modern Love
Tired of being deferential to men in my relationships, I decided to create my own drag king persona.
The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble, The New York Times Magazine
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
AT HOME ABROAD Crisis and Renewal,
The New York Times
The author moved to Buenos Aires with her Argentine husband in 2001, they divorced a few years later but she decided to stay on.
The Coast of Utopia,
The New York Times Style Magazine
In Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village in southeastern Uruguay where there’s no electricity, squatters have been building whimsical homes since the 1960s.
I Love Dick on television marks the rise of the female loser,
The Guardian
Amazon’s series based on Chris Kraus’ 1997 comic novel presents a new type of female life – an unsettling vision of a radical loser that should be celebrated.
House of Mirth,
Vogue
When her young life started going sideways, Maxine Swann took the cure at her grandparents’ twelve-bedroom manor house out of a Wharton novel, where eccentricity was embraced.
Buenos Aires, take two,
Buenos Aires Herald
Returning to Buenos Aires with a newborn, the author discovers a whole other side of the city she loves and calls home.
DRAG KING
In the fall of 2019, I took a drag king workshop on a whim after separating from my son’s father. Little did I know that my life would take a dramatic swerve. Week after week, with ten other women in a rundown nightclub in Buenos Aires, I began to channel the magnetic, dominant, narcissistic men in my life. In the process, I started accessing new behaviors and attitudes, feelings of self-confidence, anger and aggression that had been shut down when I entered puberty and girlhood. This other side of me, my Drag King, became harder and harder to leave behind in that club each week.
Drag kings, who have existed for centuries in the underground, open a new angle to the fervent discussion of gender in our times. Like drag queens, who typically point to the masquerade of femininity by representing stereotypes that spill over into comedy, drag kings reveal the equally constructed character of masculinity — the clothes, the walk, the gaze, the voice — calling into question any intrinsic claims to power, and delivering their revelations with empathy and humor.
When the workshop ended, my companions and I weren’t ready to throw in the towel and formed a drag king theater company. We put on cabaret shows in Buenos Aires clubs and shoot films about our drag kings.
Drag kings have spent too long in the shadow of the queens. It's time for them to step out into the light.
Kings and Actors:
Sr. Oso (Maruja Bustamante)
Sandro King (Bel Gatti)
Adam Smith (Dalila Serebrinsky)
Ernesto Che Guevara (Eva Mateos)
El chamán (Maxine Swann)
The lieutenant (Mirta Predieri)
Benito Camela (Alma Holovatuck)
Violeta Marquis
Valentina Brishantina
Felina Garbus
Video and Photo:
Julia Lucesole
Paz Elduayen
Estrella Herrera
Marco Rossi
Amir Kalim
Mag Garcia
Sebastián Freire
Majo Malvares
Vareila Mairanga
WORKSHOPS,
COACHING
AND EDITING
At Barnard, One Generation of Writers Nurtures the Next,
New York Times
Eleven students were sitting around a table at Barnard College expressly to learn how to write fiction, and their teacher, the novelist Maxine Swann, told them, “I cannot teach you to write.”
BIO
Ph: Sebastián Freire
Maxine Swann is an American writer and film-maker based in Buenos Aires. Author of three novels, Flower Children, Serious Girls and The Foreigners, she received a Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories have appeared in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories, O’Henry Prize Stories and Pushcart Prize Stories, and her nonfiction work has been optioned for film. Born in Pennsylvania, she has been living in Buenos Aires since 2001 and is a founding editor of the bilingual English-Spanish cultural magazine The Buenos Aires Review. She has taught creative writing at Barnard College and The New School in New York, The Walrus School in Buenos Aires and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. In 2021, she began to study her second love after literature, film. Her short film, “Fourteen Poems,” premiered in the Mar del Plata Film Festival in 2023 and won Mentions in Festival Asterisco and VAEFF. Her non-fiction feature-in-progress, "When We Were Kings", was awarded the Lumiton incentive prize from the Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires in 2024. Since 2019, she has been a member of a drag king theater company and is currently writing a book about her drag king experience.