My Lover, the Rabbi

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 KrausMy literary version of heaven. Neurotic erotic bliss – Melissa BroderEcstatic, erotic, electric, and utterly captivating. You won’t read anything else like it this year, possibly ever – Andrew McMillanMy 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 TeaWildly 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 BartlettOne of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity – John WatersA writer and thinker for all time – Maggie NelsonKoestenbaum is an exuberant critic, enraptured poet, intoxicated historian… I can hardly think of a writer who is so exacting about his own enthusiasms, so diligent in his pursuit of joy, so principled in the defense of pleasure – Brian DillonI’ll go wherever putto, poet, painter and-little did you know-lounge crooner and ivory tinkler Wayne Koestenbaum wants to take me – Rachel KushnerWhatever his subject favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings… His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination… Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence – Parul Sehgal * The New York Times *An incantatory novel that works its magic on the reader. My Lover, the Rabbi unfolds, sentence by sentence, at the mercy of language itself. No one writes like Wayne Koestenbaum and this book, like his prose, is playful, theatrical, surprising, sophisticated – Lauren Aimee CurtisMuch anticipated… 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 Lit *

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, novelist, artist, and performer. He has published over twenty books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, and Jackie Under My Skin.