Readings at Parkside:  
Wayne Koestenbaum 

The Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York City
Sunday, March 22nd, 4pm

Sliding scale tickets available HERE!

A 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 they’re apart, the narrator manically contemplates every element of the rabbi’s 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 rabbi’s 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.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.  His many books span poetry, essays, biography, and fiction.  The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.  A widely shown painter, he released his first piano/vocal album, Lounge Act, in 2017. He lives in New York.