The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Koestenbaum, Wayne

ISBN 10: 1635901448 / ISBN 13: 9781635901443

Published by Semiotext(e) (edition ), 2021

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience. Seller Inventory # 1635901448-11-1

Synopsis:

Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.

In his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé.

Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.

About the Author: Wayne Koestenbaum--poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer--has published nineteen books, including The Queen's Throat, which was praised by Susan Sontag as "a brilliant book" and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art's painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables (Semiotext(e)...
Publisher: Semiotext(e) (edition )
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good