My Lover, the Rabbi

ISBN: 0374620180

Author: Koestenbaum, Wayne

Condition: New

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vulture, Electric Literature, Our Culture, and Lit Hub"My Lover, the Rabbi circles and penetrates the outer edges of perception and experience. Its a brilliant book, written with manic zeal and cool strategy." -Chris Kraus"My literary version of heaven. Neurotic erotic bliss." -Melissa BroderA 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 theyre apart, the narrator manically contemplates every element of the rabbis 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 rabbis 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 Koestenbaums 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.