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 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
Much 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 *
I found myself cackling…from beginning to end… [Koestenbaum’s] sensibility for comic detail…is consistently this novel’s greatest strength… [He] is a stylist who writes with elegance, nerve and dexterity * Haaretz *
Will have some choking on their cornflakes from its very first page, as Koestenbaum’s narrator delights in the intimate details of his sexual relationship with a practising rabbi… A groundbreaking artist * Telegraph *
The poet, artist and writer has always maintained a cult status in America… So thank goodness a UK publisher has finally caved; Granta have released Koestenbaum’s newest novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, a slutty and bizarre doorstopper that, like much of the author’s work defies classification * The Skinny *
Rhapsodic… This is the rare novel that believably analogizes sex with matters of the spirit and intellect, suggesting that a through-line of tender scrutiny courses through each of these spheres * Vulture *
As fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year… A gloriously original evocation of the unknowability of any object of desire, and - beyond that - a vision of what it might feel like to admit to the inability of love to triumph over death… Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, one who is resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth – Neil Bartlett * Guardian *
Neurotic and erotic * Tatler *
Voyeuristic, perverted and hilarious… My Lover, the Rabbi unfolds as an unflinching enquiry into the self-consuming grammar of want: the way longing loops back on itself, feeding not on its object but on its own appetite – Nate Lippens * TANK Magazine *

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.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.