My Lover, the Rabbi

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.

The first novel in nearly twenty years from one of our most acclaimed stylists, Wayne Koestenbaum’s 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.

Author Biography

Wayne Koestenbaum is a 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 the librettist for the opera adaptation of his book Jackie Under My Skin. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, 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.