Wayne Koestenbaum: The Imitation Mustache, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

In his first essay collection since Figure It Out , Wayne Koestenbaum-eccentric, erudite, and endlessly inquisitive- explores his visions of art, music, and literature with supercharged clarity. In The Imitation Mustache: & Other Essays , Wayne Koestenbaum brings his "alarmingly focused attention to detail" (John Waters) to a quintessentially Koestenbaumian range of subjects: Susan Sontag's film Duet for Cannibals and the poet Kevin Killian's collected Amazon reviews, Alice Neel's expressive portraits of queer people and Hervé Guibert's photograph of a lover's backside.

Perpetually writhing within these essays is an obsessive, impressionistic reckoning with Koestenbaum's own personal questions and desires: a torn self-portrait with a striped T-shirt leads to a thrilling spiral over ballpoint pens, old phone numbers, and his mother; an analysis of Keats, Frost, and iambic pentameter opens a rabbit hole of lust and panic; a reflection on the act of flossing-"a retroactive prayer"-considers excavations of all kinds, corporeal and spiritual.

Featuring a handful of never-before-published autobiographical works alongside a range of pieces from The New York Times Magazine , Bookforum , the London Review of Books , and elsewhere, The Imitation Mustache turns Koestenbaum's rare power of understanding toward the totality of life. It is, as he describes the extracted food from his teeth, "an anthology, a cluster of marks, a reckoning with formerly unseen minutiae."