Description

To the untrained eye, the rabbi is far from desirable. He is lofty and unkempt, he is ageing and his congregation is ever diminishing. But to one man, he is the object of obsession.

Our narrator adores the rabbi and worships the universe between his legs. But so too does he bristle at being relegated to the peripheries of the rabbi’s life. When they’re apart, he manically contemplates every element of the rabbi’s being: his absent husband; his first (and only) wife and child, both now deceased; his unstable, yet alluring, adopted son. Until, in a bid to help sustain their relationship, our narrator embarks on an increasingly urgent quest to better understand his mercurial lover – one which threatens to upturn the lives of both men.

Lavish and lascivious, My Lover, the Rabbi is an exuberant exploration of devotion and desire, as well as a careening Catherine wheel of a novel about queer family-making, one which is attuned to the mysterious constellations and patterns that shape our lives.

Publisher Review

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 My literary version of heaven. Neurotic erotic bliss — Melissa Broder Ecstatic, erotic, electric, and utterly captivating. You won’t read anything else like it this year, possibly ever — Andrew McMillan 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 One 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 Waters A writer and thinker for all time — Maggie Nelson Koestenbaum 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 Dillon I’ll go wherever putto, poet, painter and-little did you know-lounge crooner and ivory tinkler Wayne Koestenbaum wants to take me — Rachel Kushner Whatever 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 Curtis