"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 HubA psychosexual relationship between a rabbi and...

An intimate depiction of the visionary who revolutionized the art worldA man who created portraits of the rich and powerful, Andy Warhol was one of the most incendiary figures in American culture, a celebrity whose star shone as brightly as those of the Marilyns and Jackies whose likenesses brought him renown. Images of his silvery wig and glasses are as famous as his renderings of soup cans and Brillo boxes—controversial works that elevated commerce to high art. Wa...

The chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy.Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit sp...

Jackie Under My Skin is a nuanced description of how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed our definitions of personal identity and style. As Wayne Koestenbaum follows her into America's dreamwork, far from pious "family values," he dares to see her as a pleasure principle, a figure of Circean extravagance, and liberates her from the propagandistic uses to which her image if often harnessed.

“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“Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision ...

In his first essay collection since Figure It Out, Wayne Koestenbaum—eccentric, erudite, and endlessly inquisitive— explores his visions of art, music, and literature with supercharged clarity.In The Imitation Mustache: & Other Essays, Wayne Koestenbaum brings his “alarmingly focused attention to detail” (John Waters) to a quintessentially Koestenbaumian range of subjects: Susan Sontag’s film Duet for Cannibals and the poet Kevin Killian’...

A new edition of a “dazzlingly seductive” fever dream written in “brilliant poetic vernacular” (Bookforum) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner.For five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family’s home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random s...

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Ki...

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing become...

Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel (Hotel Women) featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum’s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books - one fiction, one nonfiction - run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles a,” an,” and the” never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s drea...

Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt’s entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary Americ...

Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays on the 1980s, including essays on major cultural figures such as Andy Warhol and Brigitte Bardot.Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as "an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag" ( Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and ...