My Lover, the Rabbi

"An unbeatable stylist with a track record of dilating small moments of observation into wide swaths of philosophy and psychology . . . a proud belletrist, Koestenbaum shakes against narrative like a vibrator that switches on in its plastic packaging." -Daniel Felsenthal, Vulture Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vulture, Electric Literature, Our Culture, and Lit Hub A psychosexual relationship between a rabbi and the man devoted to him goes off the rails in this explosive novel. The rabbi is, to the untrained eye, far from desirable. Lofty and disorderly, aging and constantly losing members of his flock, he is nonetheless the singular object of obsession for the self-abjecting narrator of My Lover, the Rabbi. From the start of their psychosexual affair, the two men torment, pleasure, and manipulate each other with ardor. When they're apart, the narrator manically contemplates every element of the rabbi's being: his alluring adopted son, his false erudition, his patrilineage, his broken-down Pontiac, his out-of-state husband (who the narrator has also slept with), and, maybe most of all, the universe between the rabbi's legs. Spending time together in the narrator's bed, in a tiny town near Hoboken, New Jersey, that our narrator is "devastated to admit is my personal address," a tender, volatile intimacy brews and curdles. To sustain it, the narrator continues on an unrelenting, increasingly urgent quest to understand the mercurial, ardent rabbi's mysterious past-that is, until he begins to question reality itself. In the process, conflicting truths about the rabbi emerge, with drastic consequences for both men and those around them. The first novel in nearly twenty years from one of our most acclaimed stylists, Wayne Koestenbaum's My Lover, the Rabbi is a sui generis spiral of lascivious thrills and uncanny hilarity, exposing in delirious detail the dangers-and spoils-of true love.

Wayne Koestenbaum-poet, critic, fiction writer, painter, filmmaker, performer-has published more than 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, and 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 many other publications. He 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 given musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, the Renaissance Society, and other venues; he released an album of piano and vocal music, Lounge Act. He has received 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 acquired his literary archive. A Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, he lives in New York City.