Jordy Rosenberg
“The thing about fiction. . .is that you leap into an unknown space in the reader, and speak to that. I have some confidence and hope that trans readers and queer readers will feel spoken to and feel the intimacy that I was trying to generate in the writing. But you can’t control who the reader is. I wanted to make that form of intimacy open to whoever.”
“A riotous and transporting novel...Jordy Rosenberg is a total original - part scamp, part genius - who has written a rich and rollicking page-turner of a first novel.”
“Confessions of the Fox is so goddamned good. Reading it was like an out-of-body experience. I want to run through the streets screaming about it. It should be in the personal canon of every queer & non-cis person. READ IT.”
“[A] hat tip to Moby Dick. . .a running footnote hall of mirrors to rival Borges. . .one of the most trenchant calls for progressive action I have read in a very long time. The climb may be steep, but the view from the top is grand.”
“Confessions of the Fox is a cunning metafiction of vulpine versatility.”
Jordy Rosenberg is the author of the novel Confessions of the Fox (One World/Random House, 2018) , which Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called “Astonishing and mesmerizing," Booklist raved, “Resonant of George Saunders, of Nikolai Gogol, and of nothing that’s ever been written before...irreverent, erudite, and not to be missed.” A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection, Confessions has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, the UK Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award, and longlisted for The Dublin Literary Award. Confessions was named by The New Yorker, among other places, as one of the Best Books of 2018.
Confessions of the Fox is one of the first novels written by a transgender writer, edited by a non-binary editor, and published by a major publishing house. It is an electrifying, sui generis work. A love story set in the eighteenth-century London of notorious thieves and queer subcultures, this genre-bending debut tells a profound story of gender, desire, and liberation.
In an interview with Huffington Post, Rosenberg discussed the relationship of trans fiction to a broader project of liberation, "There are ways in which, for trans people, for genderqueer people, and for many oppressed people, our existence is treated as an unreality, and that’s something that we fight against. The language and literature is one way. It’s not the only or even the primary way. But we [do] also have to fight for the ability to write fiction and to write stories that are themselves speculative and unreal…. We can resist th[e] self-objectifying case study model [that often encloses mainstream trans narratives]."
Rosenberg is also a scholar and Professor of Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and gender and sexuality studies. He has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation/J. Paul Getty Trust, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Clarion Foundation’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
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