Description: With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances--in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life.
Brief description: Wayne Koestenbaum isa Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His many books span poetry, essay collections, biography, and fiction; he is also an accomplished playwright and the librettist for the opera adaptation of his book Jackie Under My Skin. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays and poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, and many other publications. A widely shown painter, he released his first album of piano and voice in 2017. He lives in New York.
Review Quotes:
"This literary 'topping from the bottom' is the funniest, smartest, most heartbreaking yet powerful book I've read in a long time." --John Waters
"Humiliation runs like a rash over the body of all of Wayne Koestenbaum's work; here, he directly addresses the feeling, and the result is one of my favorite recent books: psychologically astute, verbally pyrotechnic, bottomlessly provocative, surprisingly funny, and immensely sad. An extraordinary meditation on nothing less than--I don't know how else to say it--the human condition." --David Shields, author of Reality Hunger