Wayne Koestenbaum--poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer--has published nineteen books, including The Queen's Throat, which was praised by Susan Sontag as "a brilliant book" and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art's painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
"These charmingly insouciant short stories by the noted critic,
poet and essayist exhibit the same surreal whimsy that
distinguishes his work in other formats."—New York Times Sunday
Book Review
"Koestenbaum sucks every last drop of nectar out of words, like an
avid hummingbird at its flowers, then hovers over sentences so
exquisitely precise, bejewelled and hilarious -- just fall back
already into the glistening boners and coruscating silvergrass. (Is
that Ashbery or Laura Riding lying deep in flora beside you?)
Surrender yourself to the engorged astonishments of these
fables."—Guy Maddin, filmmaker
"Wayne Koestenbaum derails the sexual and gender conventions of the
genre of the mystical-and-mythical-style fable using trans and
queer speculative porn-fiction and lyrical criticism. Narratively
exquisite and fiercely irreverent, his fables construct a brilliant
one-of-a-kind mind-body-game where literature becomes a sort of
“operation” in the unconscious infrastructure of our desire.
Strikingly original, tender, radical, funny, unforgettable."—Paul
B. Preciado, author of An Apartment on
Uranus and Testo Junkie
"Wayne Koestenbaum's marvelous Cheerful Scapegoat is
festooned with beaucoup celebs from today's fables and those of
centuries past, including Marxists ("sexually speaking"), torch
singers, forgotten Hollywood stars, Greek heroes and unknown kings.
Each story mercifully eschews the conventional Aesopian tale, often
in a fabulously cheeky mode, where every maxim or
moral strives for “vaudeville grandeur” rather than tidy
meaning. While gorgeous and funny, Koestebaum’s stories movingly
graze the human only to kiss the divine, often “with the melancholy
that only an unfinished cigarette has the effrontery to epitomize.”
This book is something rare, something new."—Andrew Durbin, author
of Skyland
"This is an elegant, rude book—beautiful and acerbically composed.
Like scenes scripted by Edward Gorey and directed by Ryan
Trecartin, Wayne Koestenbaum’s brief parables manage to be at once
delicate and extreme, vile and flowery, cooly precise and
gorgeously insane. I don’t know anyone else who writes like
this."—Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or,
The Origin of the World
"Do you, Dear Reader, crave some dark wit with your titillation, a
little salt in your cocktail, a love-bite with your Benjamin? Do
you prefer not to solve love? Do you prefer paste to rarity? Rot to
profit? Monica Vitti? Between Streisand and Wilde, would you rather
not choose? In the eruditely amoral tradition of Guy Davenport,
here are elegant tales which invite new lascivious forms of
attention. You will not be glum. Each sentence has a fabulous
mouthfeel. You’ll be imbued with a fresh capaciousness. You will
find that each can be adored."—Lisa Robertson, author of The
Baudelaire Fractal
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