Wayne Koestenbaum: 9 books

Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays 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...

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...

Wayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection. The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with scarlet-letter moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. In these moments we not only witness the reversibility...

An intimate depiction of the visionary who revolutionized the art world A 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...

Soft Skull is reissuing Koestenbaum’s first novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes with a new title, Circus A story of art and obsession pushed to the extreme, Circus received glowing critical reviews; Kirkus described it as the “mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean...

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,...

An award-winning essayist and cultural critic, Koestenbaum's fourth book of poetry presents a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet's present home and various events from childhood.

Thirty years of interviews that offer “a window into the minds and the writing processes of some of the world’s best practitioners of poetry and prose” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).   Since 1981, the quarterly magazine Bomb has been the gold standard for artist-on-artist interviews,...

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne—a collection of twenty-four new personal essays...