My Lover, the Rabbi

“As fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year … as the book proceeds, [the] reiteration of the title begins to toll like a bell through the architecture of its prose, becoming almost a mantra. Far from being style-for-style’s sake, this insistent and anxious formality is at the heart of the book’s uncanny life; a quite brilliant matching of style to subject … for the whole of his 188 chapters, Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, one who is resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth.” –Neil Bartlett, The Guardian

“The most convincing depiction of romance I’ve read in years …This is the rare novel that believably analogizes sex with matters of the spirit and intellect, suggesting that a through-line of tender scrutiny courses through each of these spheres.” “ –Daniel Felsenthal, Vulture

“Koestenbaum re-enters the fictional fray with his first novel in almost two decades. And what a novel it is … Its 464 pages, like their author’s visual art practice, pull no punches in their depiction of sexual obsession.” –Adam Eli, Cultured

”[A] much anticipated novel … Fans of Garth Greenwell will delight in Koestenbaum’s demonstration of the sublime against corporeal obsession, play, need, humiliation, grief, desire, camp, refusal to engage in any heteronormative norms.” –Electric Literature

“Koestenbaum’s acrobatic prose is erudite and wry, careening from highbrow culture to sex to confession and back again.” –Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

“The narrator burrows deeper into the rabbi’s life and surroundings, turning the novel into a hero’s quest, if such a journey were Jewish, neurotic and broadly sexual. [Koestenbaum’s] winding sentences … shine with brilliance.” –Sam Franzini, Moment

“A novel you will want to start all over again once you have finished it … [Koestenbaum] is a consummate stylist who writes with full awareness of his own virtuosity.” –Antiphony Journal

“In delirious, short chapters, our maniacal narrator relates his erotic obsession with an unnamed rabbi … Evocations of Portnoy and even Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge, Jean Genet, Thomas Bernhard–the list goes on. But this is all Koestenbaum, who is at his unbridled, scatological best.” –The Center for Fiction

“Perverse and perplexing, this novel is a scream.” –Publisher’s Weekly

The novel inhabits an insistently queer social universe, largely emptied of heteronormative family structures, where intimacy and authority are rerouted through erotic and spiritual fixation. Grief runs beneath the gleaming prose … A brilliant, demanding novel-as-performance that resists pat simplification.” –Kirkus

“Like Ingeborg Bachman’s Malina, My Lover, the Rabbi circles and penetrates the outer edges of perception and experience. It’s a brilliant book, written with manic zeal and cool strategy.” –Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together, I Love Dick, and Summer of Hate

“My literary version of heaven. Neurotic erotic bliss.”
–Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley and Milk Fed

“My Lover, The Rabbi is so intimate, so fearless, I couldn’t put it down. Poetic and voyeuristic, thick with unflinching detail, I am in awe of this vulnerable, beautiful book.”
–Michelle Tea

“Wildly funny, proudly filthy, uncompromisingly committed to finding shapes for what really matters in life, this is an exceptional piece of writing. As obsessive as Proust, as entertaining as Almodovar, this deep dive into the strange equivalences of desire and loss is surely going to win Koestenbaum a whole new army of admirers.” –Neil Bartlett

“Ecstatic, erotic, electric, and utterly captivating. You won’t read anything else like it this year, possibly ever.”
–Andrew McMillan

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, fiction writer, painter, filmmaker, and performer. He has published over twenty books, including:

• Stubble Archipelago
• The Cheerful Scapegoat
• Figure It Out
• Camp Marmalade
• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
• Humiliation
• Hotel Theory
• Andy Warhol
• Jackie Under My Skin
• The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award)

His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the London Review of Books, and numerous other publications.

Koestenbaum has had solo exhibitions of his visual art at White Columns, 356 Mission, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, Millennium Film Workshop, and Gattopardo. He has presented musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, and the Renaissance Society, among other venues. He also released an album of piano and vocal music titled Lounge Act.

He has been honored with an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, and a Whiting Award. Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired his literary archive.

Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and resides in New York City.

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