Wayne Koestenbaum has built himself a slow-burn reputation as one of America’s sharpest queer iconoclasts, but the title of his latest novel suggests Netflix-ready realism. Will My Lover, the Rabbi be a sober yet uplifting account of the conflict between religious orthodoxy and forbidden desire? Not a bit of it. The book’s central and anchoring fact – the overwhelming desire of a man who works as an antique furniture restorer for a man who works in a synagogue – is accepted as a given by every single character. The writing, meanwhile, treats all realist convention with a kind of exalted scorn, conjuring the dangers and delights of obsession in prose that is itself unashamedly obsessive – and wonderfully frank when it gets down to the physical details. The result is as fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year.

The fierceness begins immediately. All the book’s 188 chapters are short, but the first one comes in at only four lines. Putting both punctuation and vocabulary to tactically unexpected use, it plunges the reader straight into a world of carnality, confusion and bizarrely specific detail. Like all but a handful of the chapters, it also includes the title of the book itself. And as the book proceeds, this reiteration of the title begins to toll like a bell through the architecture of its prose, becoming almost a mantra. Far from being style-for-style’s sake, this insistent and anxious formality is at the heart of the book’s uncanny life; a quite brilliant matching of style to subject.

As a plot begins to emerge, the book seems – bizarrely, given its otherwise staunchly modernist mechanics – to be almost 19th century in its storyline. Though set in a recognisable America of anonymous lakeside apartments, ageing conspiracy theorists and alternative family structures, the main plot points could be straight out of Balzac: infidelity, illegitimacy, madness, shopping, coincidences and death. As in Balzac – or Proust, for that matter, another expert in the mechanics of obsession – it eventually turns out that almost all the characters have either slept with each other or are otherwise entangled.

Even more Proustian is the furniture restorer’s need to discover the secret of his rabbi’s attractiveness, something he experiences as both imperious and inexplicable. Like Proust’s Swann, he persuades himself that the key to his love object’s allure must lie not so much in their lovemaking as in some undisclosed emotional hinterland. Eventually, the narrator decides the mystery he has to solve is that of the death of his lover’s three-year-old son. Thereafter, every attempt to explicate who this child was, why he died and whether he is in fact even dead reveals only further vistas of unknowability.

Around this central conundrum, the plot spirals into a dizzying series of interconnected withholdings, digressions and non sequiturs, punctuated at regular intervals by a series of unashamedly filthy sex scenes, all of which serve only to return our narrator to the primal scene of his devotion. Meanwhile, the furniture restorer’s sentences continue to combine physical breathlessness with emotional abruptness, spiking the slow-motion strangeness of their locations and encounters with an almost lascivious instinct for outrage. Imagine Ronald Firbank, but filmed by John Waters; Saki, but channelled by Gary Indiana.

One of Koestenbaum’s trademark fascinations has always been with people’s names; like Dickens, he loves an oddly memorable christening. However, in this book, amid a multitude of idiosyncratically named characters, the key figures of the lover and his rabbi remain conspicuously nameless; just as in the title, they are only ever pronouns.

The whirlwind invention of the last 20 pages reveals why. As it turns out, the book isn’t really about the maddening elusiveness of an individual body; in a final, fugue-like recapitulation, the narrator’s obsessive desire to understand or unravel his beloved morphs into a gloriously original evocation of the unknowability of any object of desire, and – beyond that – a vision of what it might feel like to admit to the inability of love to triumph over death.

But there’s no need to grit your teeth and hope to make it to the end; for the whole of his 188 chapters, Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, one who is resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth. I hope that knowingly provocative title encourages more people to risk their first encounter with this inimitable and deeply serious writer.

As brisk weather moves in and the buzz of back-to-school preparations fills the air, you may find yourself drawn to the library or the comfiest chair in the house. The autumn reading season is a time of abundant current and forthcoming releases, perfect for cozying up with the books in your TBR and adding some new ones. Below, we offer an appealing mix of recent titles and gems soon to hit the shelves for making the most of your fall days. All of these are books we either have covered or plan to feature in our digital magazine. Happy reading!

 

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life
by Graham Watson

Hardcover Aug 2025. 288 pages
Published by Pegasus Books

Lovers of literary history will relish curling up with this book in an armchair this autumn. The famed eldest Brontë sister had a fascinating (if tragic) life, and historian Graham Watson captures new details here through Charlotte’s correspondence with friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, among others. BookBrowse reviewer Peggy Kurkowski writes, “The Invention of Charlotte Brontë peels away more than a century of Brontë myth to reveal the complex woman at the heart of it, and the supreme act of friendship and fortitude it took to tell her story to the world.”

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People Like Us: A Novel
by Jason Mott

Hardcover Aug 2025. 288 pages
Published by Dutton

National Book Award winner Jason Mott’s engaging latest novel is the perfect bookish read to get in the mood for this year’s fall awards season. With narratives following two Black American authors as they interact with a racist and violent America from inside and outside of it, People Like Us explores the absurdities of living within an impossible status quo, the line between fiction and reality, and fantasies of escape. Check out our accompanying Beyond the Book article for some background on previous National Book Award winners and the prize itself.

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Seduction Theory: A Novel
by Emily Adrian

Hardcover Aug 2025. 240 pages
Published by Little Brown & Company

Want to be whisked away to a college campus setting this fall? Try Seduction Theory, a scintillating exploration of power dynamics and the intricacies of attraction that holds appeal for readers who enjoy being immersed in academic life. It features a married couple, both authors who teach at the same university, and an infidelity in their relationship narrated by a student with ulterior motives. This unique setup creates a sly, self-referential story for those who like their literary fiction with a twist.

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Dominion: A Novel
by Addie E. Citchens

Aug 2025. 240 pages
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Addie E. Citchens’ recently released debut, the story of a devoutly Christian Black Southern family and the tensions running through it, has already garnered multiple starred reviews, earned comparisons to the writing of Hurston and Faulkner, and been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Juggling interactions between spirituality and sexuality, patriarchy and the experiences of women living under it, Dominion seems on track to become the kind of book people will be talking about for a long time to come.

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Amity: A Novel
by Nathan Harris

Hardcover Sep 2, 2025. 320 pages
Published by Little Brown & Company

Nathan Harris’s much-anticipated sophomore effort, Amity, is another stunning work of historical fiction set in the Reconstruction era (after his evocative and highly acclaimed debut The Sweetness of Water, a BookBrowse Best of Year book). It follows June and Coleman, siblings still entangled with the family who enslaved them, as they embark on separate journeys—June to find freedom in the northern Mexico desert, Coleman to be reunited with his sister.

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The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs
by Dr. Gerta Keller

Sep 9, 2025. 320 pages
Published by Diversion Books

The mass extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid, right? Not according to The Last Extinction. Dr. Gerta Keller’s upending of one of the first scientific “facts” many of us learned as children is world-altering and could inform our current climate crisis. Keller also details her experience of sexism and dismissal in the scientific community as she worked to bring her findings to light. This combination of personal memoir, drama, and science with real-life stakes for us all is likely to make this a fascinating fall pick for book clubs, nonfiction readers, and even those not normally drawn to nonfiction.

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Will There Ever Be Another You: A Novel
by Patricia Lockwood

Sep 23, 2025. 256 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

Following up on her first novel No One Is Talking About This, a Booker Prize finalist, Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You likewise addresses grief, but with a more general and philosophical focus that reflects the end of a certain way of life in our current moment. Featuring a character dealing with chronic illness, an author who struggles with her craft due to symptoms of Long Covid, the story engages with the ongoing impact of the pandemic in a unique and captivating voice that moves laterally rather than through a traditional plot arc.

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Heart the Lover
by Lily King

Sep 30, 2025. 256 pages
Published by Grove Press

Here’s another campus-set novel, this one for those who may be moved to relive their undergraduate days. Lily King’s character-driven stories have a knack for pulling readers into their worlds, and Heart the Lover, focusing on a college love triangle, promises to be a powerful whirlwind of emotions and nostalgia. According to Kirkus, King’s “mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia.”

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Minor Black Figures: A Novel
by Brandon Taylor

Oct 14, 2025. 320 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

Speaking of campus fiction, Brandon Taylor has been responsible for some fantastic contributions to the genre, including Real Life and The Late Americans (which Publishers Weekly remarked “pulls off something like Sally Rooney for the Midwest”). His vivid and intense writing of interpersonal dynamics is transported to the Manhattan art scene this October with Minor Black Figures, which narrates the story of an artist who falls in love with a former priest. Kirkus writes, “Taylor is onto something rich and appealing—a story unafraid to foreground love and lust, and that treats emotional ambiguity as a starting point, not as the fuzzy ending common in literary fiction. A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art.”

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Bad Bad Girl: A Novel
by Gish Jen

Oct 21, 2025. 352 pages
Published by Knopf

According to Jen, this novel began as a memoir about her mother, but necessitated some invention along the way. It slots in nicely alongside other exciting examples of autobiographical material being released this year by longtime fiction writers (such as memoirs by Margaret Atwood and Miriam Toews), including at least one other account of a difficult mother-daughter relationship (Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, for which we also have planned coverage). Bad Bad Girl mixes humor with tragedy and history, beginning in Shanghai in the 1920s and trailing a family across multiple generations. It should be a perfect pick for readers and book clubs interested in historical fiction and complex family relationships.

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