Contemporary Authors

• Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013
• Confessions of the Fox ( novel) One World (New York, NY), 2018

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059886 Rosenberg, Jordy, author. Confessions of the fox : a novel / Jordy Rosenberg. First edition. New York : One World, [2018] xiv, 329 pages ; 25 cm PS3618.O8323 C66 2018 ISBN: 9780399592270 (hardback)

• Jordy Rosenberg - https://www.jordy-rosenberg.com/about/

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  Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He is a professor of 18th-Century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies + Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

  Confessions of the Fox is his first novel. The short description of the book is: Trans + anti-imperialist + anti-capitalist speculative fiction of jailbreaks and sex hormones. A longer description, plus reviews etc., can be found in the "Confessions of the Fox" and "Press" tabs, above.

  He lives in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts.

  If you're into that kind of thing, more about his scholarly work can be found here .

  Pics for media use can be found below.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jordy-rosenberg/#!

  Jordy Rosenberg

  Jordy Rosenberg is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of the novel, Confessions of the Fox (forthcoming from Random House’s One World imprint in June 2018), as well as the scholarly monograph, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion (Oxford University Press, 2011). His fiction, prose, and scholarship has appeared in The Boston Review’s “Global Dystopias” special issue (edited by Junot Diaz), Avidly, The Common, Salvage Quarterly, Fence, Theory & Event, Radical History Review, and PMLA, among other places.

• Social Text Online - https://socialtextjournal.org/jordan-alexander-stein-in-conversation-with-jordy-rosenberg/

  Jordan Alexander Stein in Conversation with Jordy Rosenberg
  By Jordan Alexander Stein July 3, 2018 Categories Uncategorized

  The following is an edited interview between Jordan Alexander Stein, associate professor of English at Fordham University, and Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox–just out from One World–and professor of eighteenth century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory at the University of Massachusetts.

  Jordan Alexander Stein: Confessions of the Fox is a romp! The novel follows a beleaguered Professor Voth at a Kafkaesque neoliberal university as he discovers a hitherto unknown eighteenth-century manuscript about the well-known thief and jailbreaker, Jack Sheppard. The manuscript presents a lively story about the adventures of Jack, assigned female at birth, as he learns to speak the slang of the underground and discovers love with a lascar sex worker named Bess. Along the way there are tales of queer pirates who synthesize a testosterone serum, the rise of the London police force, and the tandem growth of securitization and the rationalization of capital flows in the colonial metropolis.

  Given this wonderful and wild plot, my first question is why you chose to write a historical novel?

  Jordy Rosenberg: Thank you for this rich summary of the novel—it’s a pleasure to have it redescribed back to me in this way.

  I am not sure that I did write a historical novel. Certainly by Lukacsian standards I did not; and anyone looking for what is typically marketed as “historical fiction” will be surprised by Confessions, especially the metafictional aspect. I did, however write a novel that, in part, came out of an obsession with a historical question. That question was something I’d been trying to think about from a more scholarly angle, and it had to do with the representation of the criminalized body in the early eighteenth century in Britain, and the way that the colonial project and commodity capitalism produced some very macabre and cruel legal and political-economic debates around capital punishment. In essence, the debates had to do with whether people convicted of property crimes should be executed and their bodies dissected and displayed to the public, or whether those convicted of property crimes would be more “profitably” transported to the colonies to do the work of colonial dispossession. In essence, the debate ranged around the historical intersection of the body, land, imperialism, and the rise of the capitalist form of property: was the criminalized body of more use to the state as a form of scientific “raw material” or was the criminalized body of more use as a form of exploitable indentured labor. But of course this debate also exceeds the question of “use” and so-called efficiency, because there is, folded into and underwriting all of this, the supererogatory violence and indeed constitutive sadism of the state. Brenna Bhandar’s work on the property form and racialization really helped me think through a lot of this, and I’m excited that her book synthesizing much of her work over the past many years has just come out. In any case, these questions crystallized for me not only in thinking about the baleful records of official bourgeois and bureaucratic discourse of the early eighteenth century, but also in the question of resistance. For many people at the time, Sheppard—with his notorious efforts to evade pursuit by Jonathan Wild, London’s “Thief-Taker General”—became a beloved figure for the flouting of these institutions and norms.

  JAS: Tell us more about the historical Sheppard.

  JR: I was reading about Sheppard while I was in residence at UCLA’s Clark Library in 2010. I was doing research for my monograph, but I kept getting distracted by the source material on Sheppard. Along with John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, there was a large amount of minor work produced in the period around the figure of Sheppard: multiple hack memoirs and autobiographies, fake letters written by “Sheppard” from the afterlife following his execution, many broadside accounts of his goings on, etc. He was really a folk hero, in part because he made a mockery of the sacralization of private property—commodities and prisons alike. And one of the things I’d noticed about representations of Sheppard was that he was frequently described in ways we might see now as genderqueer or gender nonconforming—effeminate, very “pretty,” and lithe. Moreover, this gender nonconformity was also represented as not only legendarily sexy but key to Jack’s ability to escape confinement, due to smallness of frame, flexibility, and so on.

  So Sheppard, as this beautiful deviant figure, functioned as a way for people to libidinally invest in imaginaries of embodied, spatialized forms of resistance to the intensifying police and prison system in the period, as well as to the cruel framework of the political economists and jurists who were squabbling over the significance of the criminalized body as raw material in death and/or as laboring body (to expropriate the land and turn it into the raw material of private property) in life. To this brutal “choice” that is not a choice, Sheppard held out the fantasy—and the praxis—of escape and liberation.

  Circling back to your first question, this long history of the carceral imperial state, the property form, and gendered embodiment was also a lens through which to think about these questions in the present (and vice versa), and I believed that the interplay between these two historical periods would be generative. In this sense, I think (hope?) I produced something in the genre of what Madhu Dubey has recently described as the “anachronistic [rather than the historical] novel”: a novel that performs historical leaps or conducts impossible proximities. The mediating wall between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the Aztec rule of contemporary Los Angeles in Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, and of course the transposition of pre-Emancipation frames onto post-Emancipation temporalities in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad are three really salient examples she gives.

  JAS: How does Bess fit into all this? She’s an astonishing character, and at a couple of choice moments, the novel does something formally very interesting by shifting into her perspective. Much as I want to, I don’t think we can close read these moments in this forum; so perhaps the best way to ask the question is, what’s the place of the sex worker in the history you just laid out, especially considering that Confessions figures her in terms of both extreme dispossession and remarkable self-possession?

  JR: Much of the Sheppard material from the period makes mention of a lover, a sex worker called “Edgeworth Bess.” The depictions of Bess in the source material are not particularly flattering. She is usually characterized in typically sexist ways as a temptress who seduces Jack into a life of crime. At a very basic level I wanted to revise the record, and to flesh out her character to exceed and refute her coding as demonic vixen. While my portrait of Bess is empirically unverifiable, that wasn’t the frame I cared about. In fact, just the opposite. Like a lot of scholars and friends, I wished to open up the fetishized, frozen archive to some theoretical questions and to a more experimental approach to history itself. I wanted to work outside of some of the constraints of the more conservative aspects of the discipline of history, and to allow speculative or philosophical questions to shape the narrative and the characterization. And, too, I was influenced by what we know about political movements, agitation, uprising, vanguard politics that have been waged by sex workers. Here, we could turn to work by scholars like Durba Mitra, who writes about the way that the figure of the sex worker underpins early sexology and the articulation of sexual difference more broadly; Svati Shah, who writes about sex worker radicalism and labor activism; and also Christina Hanhardt, whose book Safe Space has been key for me in thinking through the inextricable weave of sexuality and the spatial politics of cities. In writing the novel, I drew on this scholarship not always so much for empirical histories of sex work, but more for the theoretical constellations being mapped around bodies, power, desire, and subversion.

  There’s a related point, which has to do with the fact that I am—and many of us are—always trying to think through what it means that the privileges of access to hormones and even just to the category “trans” more broadly are rooted in struggles waged by people we may not know—people (a great many of whom were involved in forms of sex work) who fought for forms of rights and access decades before some of us were born or were adults. One of the questions that I personally needed to let guide the work had to do with how that debt and that history would or could be metabolized in fictional form. Indeed, how the form needed to be subservient to that debt in many ways.

  This returns us to the question of writing “anachronistic” fiction. “Bess” as a character doesn’t stand in for a specific political history, nor does “Jack.” For me, lining up history and characters by identity-categories wasn’t the point. I think of these characters, rather, as metafictional; and I think of them also as shaping the metafictional structure of the novel itself. Unlike some of the metafictional authors from the nineties (I won’t name names), I came to care about the stakes of certain metafictional questions like these not through Bachelard and Derrida and the fetish of literary self-reflexivity, but rather through work like Jasbir Puar’s detournement on assemblages (and Jasbir’s readings of early drafts of Confessions were crucial to my writing of the novel more broadly). What Terrorist Assemblages does with Deleuze is really open up the question of the assemblage itself–and remove it from the hallowed space of being an untouchable meta-concept–and kind of contextualize it and cause it to function within its own assemblage of thought and theory that, for me, includes work on decoloniality, the casting-into-suspicion of the archive, and a kind of fellow-traveling critique of identity politics that comes from within marginalized communities.The point here has to do with seeing history through a prism of assemblage (of space, sexuality, and policing, for example), and this leads–I think–to an understanding of how character itself might not be a reified “thing,” but rather a function that is secreted by these assemblages in a necessarily anachronistic way.

  So, the writing of the book got bound up with thinking about the ways in which gender and sexuality in the present are not things in themselves but rather are concepts forged in relation. This leads back to the issue of desire. For the book (and for its author), masculinity, you could say, is an assemblage—a form of desire more so than an identity, and this (for the book) does not exist autonomously from a relation to femmes. Despite the rise of auto-theory as perhaps the ur-mode of our literary present (which is another conversation we could have), that’s about as auto-theoretical as I’ll get in this forum.

  JAS: What about race? In Confessions, Bess is the daughter of a lascar. Is that in the historical record?

  JR: One of the things I came to feel about the way the character “Bess” functioned in other texts that rework the Sheppard narrative–primarily John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Threepenny Novel–was that she became a kind of very explicitly floating signifier. Although we really don’t know much about Bess’s “actual” history, this character is always represented as white, even though other enormous liberties have been taken with her. So many liberties are taken that, at a certain point we become aware that this character is functioning really explicitly in Gay as a fiction and as a synecdoche for a kind of collage and composite of infamous women of the period. (The artist Anja Kirschner has written very eloquently about this.) But yet no matter what extravagant liberties have been taken with this character, Bess had remained unquestionably racialized as white. It was striking to me the way that authors were happy to speculate on any aspect of this character—in fact, just create an explicit fiction of a character who happened to be named “Bess”—but shut down around the question of race and the actual concrete histories of racialization at the time. Although I have no idea how successful I was at this, it was important to me to resist the tendency of much historical fiction to just completely whitewash the city, when we know—from authors like David Dabydeen, Gretchen Gerzina, and David Olusoga—that that wasn’t what early modern London was like. Given that London was an extremely multiracial city in the eighteenth century, and that the social class that Sheppard moved in was not at all monolithically white, it seemed to me that representing Bess as the daughter of a Anglo-Protestant mother and a defected South Asian sailor was in fact a characterization more true to the spirit of the historical conjuncture than the repeated depiction of her as simply a demonic white temptress who mind-controlled Sheppard. I had some desire to write these characters into an actual love story, and in some ways this summoning of all the (utopian?) potentialities latent within the conflicting forces of a particular conjuncture goes back to the assemblage theory of fiction, rather than a fidelity to some misleading and reified notion of “character.”

  JAS: Last question. I want to go back to your point that “masculinity is a form of desire more so than an identity” and relate it to this history (and privilege) of what you called access to the category “trans.” One of the things it seems to me that Confessions handles amazingly well, from a narrative vantage, is how it expresses characters’ desires without characters necessarily having the language for what they want. Jack in particular is shown brilliantly in pursuit of things he can’t easily articulate. At the same time, a couple of subplots or scenes turn on the slang of thieves—a social context for your novel in which initiation into language is crucial. (It also proves crucial to the reader, as Voth footnotes and translates this argot for us.) So, the question here is: how are you thinking about language in relation to things like desire, identity, history? (You know, I thought it would be good to end with something small!)

  JR: The first thing to say about fiction and desire is that it’s really all about the reader’s desire, and the author’s desire for the reader’s desire. I hate to refer to Barthes because it’s such a cliché to do so at this point, but he did say it very well when he emphasized that it’s not the author but rather the reader who imparts meaning to a text by bringing their own desires/neurosis to bear upon it. The author, he says, just creates “a minor disaster of static.”

  But as for this issue of language: one thing about the thieves’ slang that interested me was how these slang dictionaries that exploded as a genre in the early eighteenth century existed to project, define, and linguistically certify a subculture in relation to the calcification of standardized English. Clearly one of the functions of these dictionaries was to conjure by spectacular exception—by fetishizing and cordoning off the “vulgar”—the space of the norm. And then these dictionaries are interesting on a number of other, related levels as well. They contained not only a great number of words for all the new kinds of property theft that had risen up in relation to the birth of commodity capitalism and the advent of shopping as such, but also a deluge of extremely explicit language for sex, sex work, and body parts. So, through the use of these slang dictionaries, I wanted to kind of riff on the ways in which the body and the institutions of capitalism are bound together at the level of language.

  And then there’s the metafictional aspect of the dictionaries—the way they are serving as a kind of vehicle for the footnotes in the novel because the editor needs to translate the slang for the reader, and, through that, we start to get a sense of the editor’s own story. So, as for that particular metafiction: I am thinking of this a bit in terms of a little theory I’ve been trying to work out that has to do with found footage and film, actually. Caetlin Benson-Allott has a really excellent discussion of the found-footage subniche of the horror genre and its convention of dual authorship (one author who is unknown, who shot the original footage; one who is known and re-presents the footage). For Benson-Allott, this is a kind of meditation on questions of the division of labor and the torquings of labor relations in austerity-culture. More complexly, I think she shows that the found footage genre (which has really exploded in the twenty-first century, particularly since, say, 2008) has two simultaneous and countervailing trajectories: the democratizating tendencies of video on the one hand, and the influence of austerity and autocracy in the industry on the other. Put another way: there is a non-coincidental simultaneity to the expansion of handheld video technologies with the industry’s push toward microbudgeting (the wars on writers’ unions, professional actors’ guilds, etc.).

  Now I want to say that I think we can see a kind of echo of this within the literary humanities and the becoming-lyric of so much theoretical writing. There is a kind of drawing-close of theory and lyricism that is also exemplified in the rise of auto-fiction or auto-theory: Brian Blanchfield, Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, etc. (Theodore Martin talks about this as the “recoding of literary language as theoretical discourse”). So here theory takes on some of the aesthetic, lyric qualities of fiction, and fiction or fictive-adjacent genres take on a self-reflexive quality in kind. None of this is new per se, but there is an intensification of this, I think, since at least 2008—a compression of lyricism and analysis at once. (To me, this is different from, though not unrelated to, Guillory’s interpretation of the lyricism of Paul de Man as symptomatizing a reaction to the shifting of university funds from the humanities to the hard sciences during the Cold War, and the legitimation of the humanities through scientific-sounding “jargon” as a somewhat unwitting response). In the case of the present, I take the becoming-lyric of theory to be (in part) a two-for-one kind of efficiency “solution” to the labors of writing and of interpretation that surfaces as a response to an increasingly defunded humanities. This move sits in strange proximity to things like the rise of data-based humanities theory. So, in an atmosphere of intensifying scarcity, theoretical writing simultaneously turns toward quantitative methods, while (only seemingly contradictorily) taking on styles of fiction and lyric, absorbing the aesthetic object within itself. In this sense, theoretical writing becomes a kind of microbudgeting which—much like the found-footage horror film—no longer has the need for costly and time-consuming extras, such as “extra-diegetic” soundtracks or (in the case of theory) aesthetic texts/object of analysis. The aesthetic text is the theory, and vice-versa. If the found-footage film absorbs the extra-diegetic as a horrifying “possession” (see, for example, Paranormal Activity), so too might contemporary theory be said to be possessed by its erstwhile objects of analysis: aesthetics, style, technique.

  Rather than struggle against this tendency, I think part of the impulse behind Confessions was a kind of literalization or exacerbation of it as a way of exploring/intensifying/recasting this phenomenon through aesthetic form itself. The result is a novel preoccupied by the uncanny horrors of unknown authorship and the instability of self-possession/inevitability of dispossession, to get back to your earlier question. All of this transpires within the diegetic frame of the novel.

  But finally, I think this question of metafiction is most intelligible when considered through the framework that someone like Dubey brings to the relationship between racialization and metafiction in twenty-first-century fiction. Dubey talks about a contemporary consciousness around “race as a hypersignificant yet not fully intelligible category, one that retains its damaging power despite its limited explanatory scope.” For Dubey, recent metafictions, in response to this contradiction, “exemplify an aesthetic—distinct not only from older models of corrective mimesis but also from the widely heralded post-postmodern realisms of the present—that is uniquely calibrated to the tricks and turns of American racecraft in the post–civil rights decades.” I’ve been thinking about this, too, in relation to some things Simone White has recently articulated regarding Amiri Baraka’s relationship to W. E. B. Du Bois, the racial politics of citationality, and even a potentially utopian aspect to citiational form: “The ocular and intellectual stress induced by attempting to read more than one text at a time…intensifies textual interplay. Reader and text (must/do) draw close…The compositional assertion that the texts must be read together means something…these marks-become-writing fasten the original to the past and herald the possibility of, not separating from the antecedent, but mutual release from the antecedent’s conditions of possibility” (79-80). Here we can see that the issue of metafiction isn’t that overplayed post-structuralist mise-en-abyme fascination with hyper self-reflexivity in itself, but rather a complex theory of history and relationality and an insistence that we cannot think about what metafiction is and what textuality is without thinking through conjunctural questions around racialization and power.

  And speaking of power, and that ur-theorist of it, and the question you closed with around desire: I think here of your chapter on Foucault in your fantastic forthcoming book on reading theory, where you describe the excitement of coming to Foucault’s critique of homosexuality as “individual psychology or identity.” If it seems counterintuitive to get excited at this disidentification with homosexual identity, you clarify in the most lovely way: “Coming out seemed to us to be the springboard not for finding ourselves, but for finding one another.” Probably this “finding” is what I cared about most in writing the novel, after all is said and done.
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Rosenberg, Jordy: CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rosenberg, Jordy CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX One World/Random House (Adult Fiction) $27.00 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-399-59227-0
In this inventive debut, Rosenberg transforms the legend of Jack Sheppard, infamous 18th- century London thief, into an epic queer love story.
When Dr. R. Voth, "a guy by design, not birth," discovers a "mashed and mildewed pile of papers" at a university library book sale, he becomes obsessed with transcribing and documenting its contents. The manuscript appears to be a retelling of the Jack Sheppard legend, but it contains a marked difference: Jack was not born Jack, but P--, a young girl with a knack for making and fixing things. P-- escapes indentured servitude and falls into the arms of Bess Khan, a prostitute of South Asian descent, who sees Jack as he longs to be seen. Together, the two lovers hatch schemes that take them across plague-ridden London, dodging the police state and the sinister grasp of Jonathan Wild, "Thief-Catcher General," who has it out for Jack. Meanwhile, in the manuscript's margins, Voth suffers at the hands of the crumbling state university and its exploitative administration. As punishment for frittering away his office hours, Voth must share the discovery of the manuscript with the "Dean of Surveillance" and a dubious corporate sponsor who leers at Jack's story and, by extension, Voth's humanity. "But you yourself are a--," the sponsor ventures to Voth in an explanation he doesn't have the guts to complete. Through a series of revealing footnotes, Voth traces queer theories of the archive as well as histories of incarceration, colonialism, and quack medicine practiced on the subjugated body. As the stories in the footnotes and the manuscript intertwine, the dual narrative shifts and snakes between voices and registers, from an 18th-century picaresque romp to an academic satire. Even when Rosenberg, a scholar of 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, allows Voth to become pedantic, it's in the service of this novel's marvelous ambition: To show how easily marginalized voices are erased from our histories--and
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that restoring those voices is a disruptive project of devotion.
A singular, daring, and thrilling novel: political, sexy, and cunning as a fox.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rosenberg, Jordy: CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571139/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=99f761f3. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
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Confessions of the Fox
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p18. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Confessions of the Fox.
By Jordy Rosenberg.
June 2018. 352p. Oneworld, $27 (9780399592270).
Resonant of George Saunders, of Nikolai Gogol, and of nothing that's ever been written before, professor of literature and queer/ trans theory Rosenberg's debut is a triumph. This eighteenth- century, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist love story tells the tale of notorious transgender thief Jack Sheppard. A rare manuscript of Sheppard's memoirs is discovered in the present day by university professor Dr. Voth, also trans, whom readers get to know through the novel's lengthy footnotes. Dr. Voth annotates Jack's life and affair with fearless sex worker Bess, including both personal and professional details. For example, Voth will provide literary evidence of time-period colloquialisms in one note and describe an ill-fated date with his pharmacist in the next. As the antique manuscript unfolds, things grow increasingly difficult for partners in crime Jack and Bess. The deadly plague encroaches on their English hovel, as do heartless mercantilism and a brutal police force. Their fury at being squashed by corrupt institutions resonates with Voth when he is fired from the university, midproject. Both narratives come to a head when it is discovered that the manuscript has been touched by generations of editors and revisionists, and Voth must reckon with the notion that this doesn't diminish the importance of Jack's story for the trans community. Irreverent, erudite, and not to be missed.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "Confessions of the Fox." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 18. Book Review Index
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Confessions of the Fox
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p50. From Business Collection. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Confessions of the Fox
Jordy Rosenberg. One World, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-399-59227-0
Academic intrigue meets the 18th-century underworld in Rosenberg's astonishing and mesmerizing debut, which juxtaposes queer and trans theory, slave narrative, heroic romance, postcolonial analysis, -and speculative fiction. The story appears in the form of an ostensibly historical document and lengthy discursive footnotes. In a 2018 not entirely recognizable as our own, transgender university professor R. Voth happens upon an apparently unread 1724 manuscript entitled "Confessions of the Fox." It purports to be the memoirs of real-life 18th- century British folk hero Jack Sheppard, whose crimes and jailbreaks transfixed his contemporaries and inspired works including Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. But this Jack was born female, falls in love with a mixed-race sex worker, and clashes with a ring of conspirators attempting to monetize a potentially priceless masculinizing elixir. Some of the footnotes Voth appends as he edits the manuscript cite scholarly references. Others are glosses on the 18th- century slang with which the swashbuckling and often sexually charged action is narrated. Still others recount Voth's own travails: broke and lonely, he must also contend with a shadowy publisher-cum-pharmaceutical company hoping to cash in on the manuscript's value. Rosenberg is an ebullient and witty storyteller as well as a painstaking scholar. Like the Sheppard of most earlier tellings, his Jack is an entertaining "artist of transgression" who sheds shackles with ease. Yet the novel is most memorable when evoking the pain behind such liberations: the constraints of individual and collective bodies, and the infinite guises of the yearning to break free. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Confessions of the Fox." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 50. Business Collection,
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Rights Available! Hot new books with
Hollywood appeal
Andy Lewis
Hollywood Reporter.
424.18 (May 23, 2018): p28. From Business Collection. COPYRIGHT 2018 Prometheus Global Media LLC http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
Full Text:
Confessions of the Fox (ONE WORLD, JUNE 26) BY Jordy Rosenberg AGENCY UTA)
Touted as a big summer debut, the UMass trans professor offers a gender-bending spin on 18th century thief Jack Sheppard and his prostitute girlfriend, told through the story of a trans scholar investigating if Sheppard's just-discovered memoir is real or fake.
Home Baked (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, 2020) BY Alia Volz AGENCY Paradigm
Multiple publishers bid on the book subtitled "My Mom, Marijuan and the Stoning of San Francisco." Volz's mother ran the city's famed Sticky Fingers underground pot bakery in the '70s and returned in the '80s to offer the brownies to help AIDS patients.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lewis, Andy. "Rights Available! Hot new books with Hollywood appeal." Hollywood Reporter,
23 May 2018, p. 28. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576952 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=34f75385. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542576952
7 of 8 8/12/18, 4:34 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the
Fox
Devons Thoma
Xpress Reviews.
(June 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoma, Devons. "Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox." Xpress Reviews, 15 June 2018.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543990847 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ad70ae02. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543990847
8 of 8 8/12/18, 4:34 PM

"Rosenberg, Jordy: CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571139/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=99f761f3. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Eathorne, Courtney. "Confessions of the Fox." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268040/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c62df6b0. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. "Confessions of the Fox." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 50. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099929/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1a22fb66. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Lewis, Andy. "Rights Available! Hot new books with Hollywood appeal." Hollywood Reporter, 23 May 2018, p. 28. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576952/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=34f75385. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Thoma, Devons. "Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox." Xpress Reviews, 15 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543990847/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ad70ae02. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.

• Tor
  https://www.tor.com/2018/07/11/book-reviews-confessions-of-the-fox-by-jordy-rosenberg/
  Word count: 1265

  book reviews

  Inverting the Antihero: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg
  Sarah McCarry
  Wed Jul 11, 2018 1:30pm 3 comments Favorite This

  “It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be,” writes the late, much-missed queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 survival manual Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Queer time, Muñoz suggests, is a strategy for demanding queer possibilities from straight retellings of the past in order to bridge the gap between the material conditions of the present and the longing for a radically utopian future. And if ever a novel has succeeded in explicitly making flesh the possibilities of queer futurity, Confessions of the Fox is that book.

  At least on its surface, Jordy Rosenberg’s debut1 novel is an exuberantly polyphonic take on the life and times of the “real”-life English folk hero Jack Sheppard, a minor thief who became the eighteenth century’s most notorious rogue after he coolly liberated himself and his lover, a sex worker known as Edgeworth Bess, from The New Prison in Clerkenwell. Sheppard’s increasingly daring prison escapes, drunken mischief, refusal to get a real job, and ultimate untimely execution inspired a canon including writers from Bertolt Brecht to Neal Stephenson.
  Buy it Now

  Such stuff alone is sufficient framework for a splendid romp, but in Confessions of the Fox Rosenberg turns the conventional antihero’s journey on its head, quilting together a dazzling array of references from Patrick Chamoiseau2 to J.L. Austin to build a novel that is equal parts anticapitalist, anticolonial queer history and delicious, exuberantly sexy caper.3 Rosenberg’s Jack is indeed history’s, but this Jack holds a vastly expanded set of possibilities: In Fox, Sheppard is a trans, queer, unlikely hero whose chosen family of rogues embody a multiplicity of queer narratives, queer insurrections, and queer times. Bear with me; I’ll explain all that.4 But if this is as far as you prefer to read, I’ll tell you this much: This book will make you want to run out into the street, set a jail on fire, and make out with someone beautiful in the smoldering ruins of carceral capitalism, and that’s about all you really need to know.

  Confessions of the Fox opens with a melancholy editor’s note from a Dr. R. Voth, a melancholy academic grieving a freshly-imploded relationship (we can tell, pretty quickly, that the breakup was almost certainly his fault5) and the new custodian of a mysterious manuscript that may or may not be the lost true history of one Jack Sheppard, rogue extraordinaire. We are already being led to understand that something different this way comes: “There was something very wrong with the manuscript,” Voth tells us as he recounts his transcription of the deteriorating pages he’s been entrusted with—by whom, exactly, it will take us the duration of the novel to learn. “And furthermore, I needed to disappear with it.”

  But before we’re told what Voth’s own escape entails, we’re dropped pell-mell into the antic dispositions of Jack Sheppard himself. Voth’s manuscript opens with a lovingly detailed description of “quim-carousing”6 and barrels off from there, in a gleeful mashup of Daniel Defoe, Sarah Waters, and The Anarchist Cookbook. And Voth’s increasingly intrusive footnotes rapidly abandon all semblance of critical distance to tell a marvelous strange story of their own, one that dive-bombs its source material and comes out the other side like a threaded needle piecing together seemingly unrelated pieces of text into a kaleidoscopic whole. Jack’s family of rogues is insistently queer and of color, and this Jack’s Bess is a universe of her own, a Southeast Asian (“We have to take the unquestioned nature of Bess’s characterization of white as less a reflection of ‘actual’ history than as the occlusion of it,” Voth tells us when we first meet her, casually setting fire to centuries of canonical erasure) refugee and sex worker who is wiser, fiercer, and more worldly than the often-hapless Jack, and whose own ferocious narrative runs clear and strong throughout.

  It’s no accident that nearly every page of Fox brings to mind Muñoz: Confessions of the Fox is a novelization of the resistant queer project of investing institutional histories with our own presence and desire, of Muñoz’s loving demand that we expand all times into queer times so that the possibility of a queer-utopian future is always present in the past, the way certain subatomic particles can exist in multiple states of being and time simultaneously.7 And by the final section of the novel, when we realize just what R. Voth’s manuscript is and where it came from, the book has long since embarked on a gleeful jailbreak of its own from the bounds of the expected. If a book can be a family, then Confessions of the Fox is a whole genealogy of love and survival extending infinitely into the past and every imaginable future.

  Confessions of the Fox is a very good adventure story indeed: by turns riveting, hilarious, and wildly sexy, a book for which the adjective “rollicking” seems to have been invented. But it’s also a searing condemnation of the state’s ongoing intrusions into queer language and desire and the hell-world intersectionality of capitalism and policing—as present in Sheppard’s time as it is in our own. And as infused as it is with anger and grief and pain, it never gives way to despair, returning again and again to Voth’s—and Rosenberg’s—central thesis: The body is transformed by love—the queer body, the textual body, the historical body, the body of our story, and, in Jack’s case, the literal body itself.

  On every page Confessions of the Fox is more than just a novel. It’s a fierce and joyful testament to the power of unsurrender, of community and refusal, a handbook for brokenhearted queers building resistance in the face of a seemingly limitless carceral state determined to imprison and deport and confine and commodify any bodies that do not meet its starkly bounded standards of personhood,8 all the way to its final, beautifully moving lines. “We will beat them,” Bess says to Jack at a critical juncture in their attempted overthrow of the forces determined to erase them. “I know,” Jack says. Maybe we will; maybe we won’t. But no matter how the present ends, Confessions of the Fox is a reminder that a better future has always been possible. It has been living inside of us all along.

  Confessions of the Fox is available now from One World.

  1: !!!! Really makes a person feel the need to up her game, I tell you what.
  2: Have you not read Texaco? Go read Texaco right now.
  3: If you grew up Catholic and are easily made bashful by Highly Erotic Passages I do not recommend reading this book on the train.
  4: Well, sort of. Sorry.
  5: God bless him.
  6: Look it up, if you didn’t get that.
  7: If quarks can be charming I don’t see why they can’t also be gay.
  8: So, you know, somewhat relevant to our Current Political Moment.

• The Millions
  https://themillions.com/2018/08/jordy-rosenberg-and-andrea-lawlor-on-exploding-narrative-structure-and-theory-posturing.html
  Word count: 2638

  Jordy Rosenberg and Andrea Lawlor on Exploding Narrative Structure and Theory Posturing
  The Millions Interview
  Jordy Rosenberg and Andrea Lawlor August 10, 2018 | 6 books mentioned 9 min read
  Related Books:

  The way I usually tell it is that I met Jordy Rosenberg outside Cafe Express in Provincetown in 1994, we immediately got into a fight about queer theory versus Marxism, we didn’t speak again until the following summer, and we’ve been friends ever since. Now, in a startling and barely believable plot twist, we’ve both come out with debut novels in the past year: Jordy’s Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018) and my Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue, 2017), each of which has been described as “picaresque,” each of which is as queer and trans as possible. At the time of this conversation, we lived in the same apartment building in Northampton, Massachusetts, but by the time you read this, we will have moved into what we have been calling the “queer commune.” Below, we attempt to make sense of this trajectory. —Andrea Lawlor

  Andrea Lawlor: When we first met—maybe 25 years ago?—we were students (well, you were a grad student) and we talked about science fiction and queer books constantly. Now you’re a scholar, a tenured professor with a monograph about capitalism and religious passion in 18th-century literature. But of course, that whole time, you were also writing fiction … I remember an early novel draft that had lesbian ghosts, is that right? Can you talk about your path to writing this novel, Confessions of the Fox, while also having another career?

  Jordy Rosenberg: It was 24 years ago, and we were both working food service jobs in Provincetown for the summer. Actually, you were working food service while also party-promoting at the Crown and Anchor. What was your night called? Was it called Boots? I remember one flyer for it which had the word “BOOTS” written in bold, and lots of xeroxed cutout photos of boots.

  AL: The night was called Pussy Galore. I am tempted to go through boxes and send you that exact flyer.

  JR: No need. I have that flyer committed to memory. That flyer really, really spoke to me.

  But the main point here is that I will go to any Lawlor parties I’m invited to—then and now, whether it involves boots or science fiction or being novelists or … whatever. When we met I was just applying to graduate school and I was really in love with critical theory and philosophy. I wanted to write fiction too, but novel-writing felt to me like a comparatively tremendous gamble compared to academia. A large part of that had to do with queerness and having a difficult relationship with my family where I didn’t receive a lot of support. It was a different time, and the tenure system was more intact then, so I just gravitated toward prioritizing academia, while also writing novels on the side. I also think maybe I had developed a kind of asceticism that I associate with my relationship to queerness at that time—like I was allowed to have my queerness, but I would have to give up some other pleasure or gratification maybe? I think fiction writing is what I decided I had to sacrifice for the sake of sex, if that makes sense.

  AL: Oof. Yes. That actually makes total sense.

  JR: Anyway, over the course of 18 or so years, I was writing and then throwing away novels for not being good enough. Being a published author of fiction just didn’t seem like a dream I was allowed to have (or keep). Finally I committed to Confessions. But wow it took a while.

  To go back to you and the party-promoting and our mutual love of science fiction, can you talk a bit about your own path to writing Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl? I’ve known you through all of it, but we haven’t really talked much about the journey itself, which maybe makes sense because these things only seem to take on a narrative arc once there is the arrival of a kind of endpoint.

  AL: I know! We know everything and nothing about each other’s writing life. It was ages before you let me read Confessions, and then when I finally read a draft, what was so surprising and compelling is how much of yourself you’d brought to it—in the footnotes of course but also in the form of the novel, and in Jack’s character. It’s funny to read a roman à clef when you maybe have the clef.

  JR: Good one. You do have the clef.

  AL: To answer your question, though, as you well know, I didn’t start writing in earnest until I was 30. I’d made zines and written a little Chandler/Joey slash (did you ever read that?) but nothing else up to that point. My girlfriend, who was in film school at the time, basically said, “Why are you in that soul-crushing job? You’re a writer.” And I thought, if she can go to film school, I can at least try writing a story. I took a night class at Gotham with Carter Sickels and, not long after, took an unpaid leave of absence from the soul-crushing job, got laid off, and got on unemployment—the second-most important thing that happened to me as a writer (the first being my girlfriend’s encouragement). I had a story I wanted to tell about young queers with slightly boring superpowers but had no idea how to start. I began to re-write Greek myths for practice, just stealing the plots, and in my attempt to retell the story of Tiresias, I wrote what became the opening section of Paul.

  Later I was in grad school, and Samuel R. Delany, my teacher, said, “I think you’re not done with Paul.” So again, I listened to good advice, and I began to try to figure out what Paul would do next. The Tiresias story fell away fairly quickly, and then I was adrift. I tried outlining, tried to understand three-act structure, tried to impose a plot, but kept coming back to my sense that I just needed to follow Paul, that my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well. I finished a draft of the novel as my MFA thesis at UMass (and you were down the hall, professing!) and then sent that out to some very kind agents, one of whom suggested I try to amp up the tension, find more conflicts. I dutifully excavated what I thought was pretty solid three-act structure, but wasn’t able, ultimately, to write a book in which Paul “learns a lesson.” This agent was really sweet about it and said to send him my next book. I ended up doubling down on a more episodic structure because I realized my reluctance had to do with my understanding of how people change, how I’ve changed—really slowly, recursively, making the same mistakes over and over. I was incredibly lucky to know the wonderful Hilary Plum and Zach Savich, who edit the Open Prose series at Rescue Press and encouraged me to submit. Hilary is a phenomenal editor—gentle but incisive—and she pushed me many times but always in order to help me make the book I was trying to write. And now it’s out! Hard to believe. You also have worked with an amazing editor, to whom you’ve dedicated your book! What’s that relationship been like?

  JR: First of all, I did not read the Chandler/Joey slash. I’m sorry about that. Are you mad? Do you still have it? I’ll totally read it now.
  Anyway. I totally get what you’re saying about the ways in which sometimes the process of trying to get literary representation can reinforce certain conventions about what a novel is “supposed” to look like. I, too, find this a kind of baffling and often artificial directive. In my case, it wasn’t so much the departure from genre that posed challenges but the way in which I was maybe trying to combine and multiply genres. Confessions is based in research I did on primary source documents about the 18th century’s most notorious prison-break artist: a real person named Jack Sheppard. What I’d noticed about that archival material was that it repeatedly presented Jack as very genderqueer—he was generally described as very lithe and effeminate and impossibly sexy. I came to feel that this genderqueer sexiness was a way for writers at the time to conceptualize the appeal of a life lived outside of the regular rhythms of the capitalist workday. So for example, because Jack was so irresistible, he’d recruit others into a life of crime. Or, his gender queerness was a way to account for how his prison breaks were possible: He was just so flexible and tiny that he was able to wriggle free of prison walls. I wanted to run with this connection I found in the archives between gender queerness and hatred of/escape from capitalism, and sort of literalize it as an explicitly fictional—actually almost science fictional—trans origin story.

  My amazing editors, Victory Matsui and Chris Jackson, were really essential to all of this. The book is a thriller, but an experimental kind of thriller with a number of parallel plotlines intersecting and weaving through each other. Victory and Chris were a genius team at not only exploding and recomposing these elements of narrative structure, voice, and tone, but also thinking through all of this alongside a number of other questions around trans representation, writing queer and trans sex, and the histories of racialization, imperialism, and the prison system. My relationship to One World became easily the most important and most intimate working relationship of my life.

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  I have a question for you about formal experimentation along these lines. One of the most fascinating elements of your novel, to me, has to do with its incorporation and remixing of what has become a really dominant trend in contemporary writing—the blending of theory and fiction. You can think of Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts as a good example of this, but there are others. Paul Preciado’s Testo-Junkie is another that people may be familiar with, but this practice is perhaps best exemplified in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. I see Paul as a new twist on what has been a very queer and feminist genre of blending theory and fiction. But rather than annotating your own text with theoretical elements that lie outside of the plot structure of the novel, you incorporate them into the plot of the text in a way that highlights the characters’ (and the author’s?) desire for theory—and at the same time, you destabilize the authority of that theory.

  So for example, there’s this moment where Paul and Jane are talking, and Paul tunes out for a second to think about some questions to do with gender and femininity, and when he tunes back in he’s missed something Jane was saying: “He had not been paying attention to the correct thing, in this case Jane’s disquisition on wanting-to-be vs. wanting-to-do, which as it turned out when he made her repeat her point had something to do with Barthes’ distinction between a readerly and a writerly text.” So you’re incorporating theory into the narrative flow of the novel and kind of (could we say?) performing this readerly vs. writerly text distinction (or confounding it) by withholding the actual Barthes quote and surrounding it with the characters’ desire for and disregard of the theory in itself. Do you want to talk a little more about how you felt the book engaged with this scene of queer theory in the ’90s, and how you thought about writing about that?

  cover
  AL: I haven’t thought about this at all, and yet when you explain myself to me, I think you must be right—I did do that smart thing you said I did! As you can see, Paul did not fall far from this tree. OK, but seriously—I don’t think of myself as writing with the intention of engaging with critical theory. Critical theory was a hugely formative part of my life, starting in the early ’90s. I had many questions for which I thought critical theory, specifically queer theory, had the answers. Like many young people encountering such thought, I read in a frenzy of excitement and despair. I tried so hard to read Gender Trouble on my own, for instance (if only I’d had your beautiful essay “Reading Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day” way back then!). I understood maybe a 10th of the Butler or Barthes or Foucault I was reading, but it didn’t matter. I wanted always to be around other queers and other seekers, and the world of queer theory was a world of queer seekers. My heroes were academics—as you may remember, I went so far as to make a Judith Butler fanzine, which I then left laying around casually to impress girls. That was what I knew of being young and queer in 1993, and so that’s what I gave to Paul. It’s been a huge relief to me in my life to realize I don’t have to produce theory—that I can be grateful for the work of scholars and critics without having to participate in that work. I’ve been procrastinating this very email exchange (written from one floor above you) because I forget I don’t have to write like an academic. And because I’ve been excited about the way you think for almost 25 years of friendship and always want to live up to that.

  JR: Well speaking of living up to, I remember that Judith Butler fanzine (titled Judy! for those readers who want to peek at this magnificence) took my breath away back in 1993. You saw something about the way that queer theory was becoming this object of desire—and also the way that queer street politics were taking shape as a theoretical field that got disciplined in and by and through the academy. I had just graduated from all those years of college where I was supposed to meet people I connected with intellectually, but I didn’t meet anyone whose brain compelled me as much as yours did until that year we were both working in P-town.
  The Millions' future depends on your support. Become a member today.

  Jordy Rosenberg and Andrea Lawlor JORDY ROSENBERG is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He is a professor of 18th-century literature, gender and sexuality studies + critical theory at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. | ANDREA LAWLOR teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017), which was a finalist for both Lambda Literary and Firecracker awards.

• Alma
  https://www.heyalma.com/jordy-rosenbergs-confessions-fox-queer-historical-novel-need/
  Word count: 1004

  Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’ is the Queer Historical Novel We Need
  By Emily Burack

  Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox begins with a note to the reader by its fictional narrator, Dr. R. Voth, who writes, “There are some things you can see only through tears.”

  Filled to the brim with queer and trans theory, Rosenberg describes Confessions of the Fox as “Trans + anti-imperialist + anti-capitalist speculative fiction of jailbreaks and sex hormones.” As Eileen Myles explains on Twitter, the book is “so palpable and fantastic, dizzying and compulsively readable.”

  Rosenberg’s debut novel is speculative metafiction; he takes a well-known historical figure and spins the narrative into something new. In Confessions of the Fox, Rosenberg writes Jack Sheppard — an English folk hero who really existed, who was an 18th-century English thief who escaped from the notorious Newgate Prison — as a trans man. In real life, Sheppard’s mom sent him to a workhouse when he was 6. In Rosenberg’s telling, Sheppard’s mom, confused by her daughter who identifies as male, was sent into servitude.

  And while he’s telling his tale of Sheppard, Rosenberg is hyper aware of what he’s writing about (hence, the metafiction aspect of the book). The main text is a 1724 manuscript of the memoirs of Sheppard (fictional, obviously), but the footnotes are crucial to the story as well — and within the footnotes is the story of Dr. R. Voth, who found Sheppard’s manuscript and annotates it. The footnotes are both fascinating (to give you greater context for Sheppard’s story) and increasingly unhinged as Dr. Voth, a trans academic, tries to uncover the mysteries of Sheppard’s memoirs while also saving his own career.

  Rosenberg writes the real-life sex worker Elizabeth Lyon (known as Edgworth Bess) as a woman of color: In the novel, Bess becomes Bess Khan, a woman of mixed-race descent (white mom; southeast Asian dad). Rosenberg explains his decision to reclaim Bess’s narrative to NPR:

  In that material, she was not represented in a very kindly way in the period. She was represented as kind of the person that lured Jack into a life of crime. And I was sort of interested in re-envisioning that — really just writing it as a love story, more of a feminist take, where she isn’t sort of this vixen that creates this perilous path for Jack, but that there’s a kind of, like, consensual and jointly-shared hatred of capitalism that they embark on together.

  As Dr. Voth writes in a footnote when Bess is introduced, “Given that London was not by any means a white city in the eighteenth century — and indeed that there were no legal prohibitions on interracial marriages at the time — we have to take the unquestion [sic] nature of Bess’s characterization as white as less a reflection of ‘actual’ history than as the occlusion of it.”

  I love this idea — that Bess’s characterization as white is just assumed, and assumptions shouldn’t be a reflection of history but rather hiding true history. How many queer characters have been lost to history? Confessions of the Fox is at the forefront of books that take the stories we know and flips them on their head — that give voice to the voiceless, and stories to the story-less.

  And this is what makes Rosenberg’s book so powerful: He reminds his readers that so much of history is forgotten. He is rewriting the history we’ve been taught and making it more queer and more diverse. While doing so, Rosenberg notes the difficulty white authors have writing characters of color. As he explains to Huffington Post, “My feeling was that the question of representation could not be left to the level of content alone, but that this question of a white author representing characters of color, which I find to be a very contradictory and complicated and, I’m sure ultimately on many levels, necessarily failed project of mine, that it was going to have to influence the form of the novel as well.”

  Rosenberg, a trans Jewish professor of 18th century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is well suited to the subject matter. His fields of research intersect in this novel: 18th century literature, moral philosophy, political theory, queer theory, and Marxism. (And while Confessions of the Fox is his debut novel, Oxford University Press published his first book, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion, in 2011.)

  Over the course of the story, Jack and Bess become partners — Vulture calls them “the Bonnie and Clyde of 18th century London” — embarking on adventures and falling in love. Rosenberg says in Slate, “the book is pretty dirty and contains explicit but non-spectacularizing material that I do hope might resonate with people in terms of some of the dynamics around queer and trans sex, intimacy, and how all that can get bound and tangled up with other kinds of political projects and impulses.” This is to say: He writes great sex scenes, without objectifying or fetishizing his characters. (Seriously. Great sex scenes. When I was reading Confessions of the Fox in a coffee shop, I almost felt like I shouldn’t be in public.)

  When NPR asks Rosenberg if he believes “there’s a lot of history that can be rewritten or at least reimagined through the eyes of people who…had to live in the shadows, who were overlooked and discounted?” he answers, “I think we all know that what gets archived in the official archives, and what falls out, is not a neutral operation. So I guess my answer to you is yes, necessarily so. And yes.” Rosenberg writes into existence characters who have surely been lost to history.
  Emily Burack

  Emily Burack is an editorial assistant at Alma.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/confessions-of-the-fox-is-a-cunning-metafiction-of-vulpine-versatility
  Word count: 1285

  “Confessions of the Fox” Is a Cunning Metafiction of Vulpine Versatility

  By Katy Waldman

  June 27, 2018

  “Confessions of the Fox,” Jordy Rosenberg’s début novel, reimagines the infamous British thief Jack Sheppard as a transgender man.
  Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan

  Before he became the pickpocket and prison escapee immortalized as Mack the Knife in Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” Jack Sheppard was a nervous kid trying to talk to a sex worker at a pub. Or so Jordy Rosenberg would have it in “Confessions of the Fox,” a début novel that weaves together the “found” memoirs of London’s eighteenth-century arch-renegade with the annotations of a rogue professor, Dr. Voth. (Voth intersperses critical commentary with tales of his own present-day loves and losses.) Jack has just slipped free of the cruel carpenter keeping him as an indentured servant. A dark-eyed woman has caught his attention, and he is intimidated (he’s as yet unused to the name Jack, and hyperconscious of the bandages constraining his chest), but to the woman, Sheppard tells himself, he isn’t “anything but another clinker fox,” or clever man—and then Voth jumps in. “Although eighteenth-century usage of ‘fox’ indicated a man,” the scholar elaborates, “now, of course, ‘fox’ broadly denotes a fetching individual of whatever gender. . . . Perhaps ‘fox’ has emerged, ungendered, from the embrace of early modern rogues, to signify simply an object of desire. An endearment. Rather: an enfoxment.”

  Foxes are the familiars of Rosenberg’s metafiction, which reimagines Jack as a transgender man. (The recently jilted Voth is also trans.) The fox delights in craft and cunning, much like Jack, a “creature of Liberation” and an “Artist of Transgression.” (For him, “shaking free from the demonic gloom of a detention-house is not unrelated to the scorch of a woman dissolving in raptures upon his tongue.”) Early modern writings about foxes emphasized their sexualized attributes: an “elongated pointed muzzle” and a thick “bushy tail.” And it can’t have been lost on Rosenberg, himself a literature professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and one of the first trans writers to release a novel with one of the Big Five publishers, that William Hazlitt cites “Of the Vox and the Wolf” as one of the earliest known beast fables in England. (Wolves are a sort of secondary spirit animal in the novel: Jack compares his genitalia, fancifully, to “a wolf emerging from the forest, dragging brambles—dripping fire from its teeth.”) An implied pun on “vox”—both Vulpes and voice—flickers beneath these “Confessions.” Which people get to tell their stories? Who gets erased?

  The novel, unfolding in a slang that is equal parts Jonathan Swift, Sarah Waters, and Eimear McBride, flexes its moral imagination with inclusive casting. Bess, Jack’s partner in love and crime, is written as Southeast Asian, though earlier chroniclers, like Brecht and the playwright John Gay, have only ever depicted her as white. (“We have to take the unquestioned nature of Bess’s characterization as white as less a reflection of ‘actual’ history than as the occlusion of it,” Voth says.) Aurie Blake, another traditionally white supporting player in Sheppardania, is portrayed as queer and of Afro-Roman descent. (Voth: “I am left to suppose that either the author of this text had personal reason to cloud the truth, or else the author has more knowledge of Blake than the Newgate Ordinary did.”) These edits perform a corrective surgery on the canon, attempting to restitute political injustices and to lift up marginalized voices. And it grows increasingly clear that the document in Voth’s hands has itself been “doctored”—emended, rectified, ardently ministered to, but also violated. One thinks of Jack’s body, brutally remade on a makeshift operating table halfway through the memoir; Bess picks up the scalpel to finish her lover’s top surgery after a quack doctor faints. In Jack’s “Confessions,” as in Augustine’s, the artistic corpus and the physical corpus illuminate each other. Both must undergo painful yet necessary transformations. Rosenberg’s epigraph comes from John Donne: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book.” Or, as Voth puts it, more plainly, “The body is . . . rewritten in the process of making love.”

  Rosenberg’s vulpine versatility produces quick changes of tone. (The fox knows many genres, while the hedgehog knows one big genre.) A suspenseful sequence in which Jack robs a toy store becomes a lush fantasy in which he hears the cries of commodities wailing for freedom; the next scene is a scorchingly sexy encounter between Bess and a rocking horse. The character’s performance on the wooden mount is sheepishly interrupted, via footnote, by Voth, who must “point out—and I know I’m a real snore—a certain resonance here with Sterne’s rather infamous theory of obsession (as figured in the hobby-horse) as the fundament of character.”

  The colors are deftly blended and controlled. “Confessions” is an action-adventure tale with postmodern flourishes; an academic comedy spliced with period erotica; an intimate meditation on belonging that doubles as a political proof. Its themes are sex and repression, writing and silence. It is also a mystery: Will the manuscript be revealed as a hoax? Why does the dystopian “Dean of Surveillance” at Voth’s academic institution seem so desperate to verify the text’s authenticity?

  Meanwhile, Jack’s underworld milieu is shadowed by the threat of plague and monitored by a burgeoning police state. A debtor turned thief catcher wants to go to market with a testosterone elixir of dubious provenance; a utopian pirate society (of ghosts?) sails toward London. The East India Company, an instrument of racist and capitalist oppression, is pursuing a policy of internment for nonwhite sailors. These threads intertwine with Voth’s travails, and with dirty reminiscences of his ex that qualify as reverent love poetry. There is an agenda to the hybridity of “Confessions,” a religion of anti-categorization. Despite his playfulness, Rosenberg has saturated his book in resistance, in pointed refusals to do what language, in its more colonial guises, is often called on to do. When Bess recounts her revolutionary past, the tale is bare of explication, because, as Voth explains, “I’m not in the habit of interrupting women when they are speaking.” And the author declines to showcase his characters’ bodies for the reader. Jack is lovingly written-around as “Daemon. Sphinx. Hybrid. Scitha, man-horse, deepwater Kraken, Monster-flower—”; during an early sex scene, Voth observes that “it is almost certainly the case that if there were a hack job—some pretend literary masterpiece written by a third party—this section would include a voyeuristic depiction of Jack’s genitalia.”

  Foxes are getaway artists: they leave behind only traces and symbols. One virtue of Rosenberg’s novel is that it never tries to cage the wild animals at its heart. (A vitiated “Lion-Man” on display for burghers in eighteenth-century London suggests the alternative: scientific diagnosis gone rancid.) Jack’s confessions uphold two contradictory claims: that love inscribes the body, and that love refuses to mark the body; for these characters, what is beloved flourishes in its own private mystery. Perhaps that is why Voth, at last plotting an escape from his Orwellian university, cannot tell us where he is going. “I’m waiting for you in the future” is all he offers. “Catch up, catch up.”

  Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more »

  More:Book ReviewsMetafictionTransgender

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• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/06/21/trans-trans-trans-trans-world/geq2nonjPTPxu58pS7guvM/story.html
  Word count: 1189

  In Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, it’s a trans, trans, trans, trans world
  By Clea Simon Globe Correspondent June 22, 2018
  John W. Tomac for The Boston Globe

  ‘‘Confessions of the Fox’’ is that rare find, a challenging philosophical work that’s also just great fun. On one level this debut novel is a swashbuckling adventure about a notorious outlaw and his forbidden love in 18th century London — the kind of off-kilter picaresque destined to become a film starring Johnny Depp .

  But even as the anti-hero Jack Sheppard and his mixed-race prostitute girlfriend, Bess Khan, fight to live life their own way in this 300-year-old story, there’s a parallel narrative unfolding. A Dr. R. Voth, an academic who has found Sheppard’s long-lost manuscript, is battling to save his academic career — and possibly his freedom, as well — in a story that unfolds in the footnotes, all while he debates the authenticity of his find and what it means for his own life, since he, like Sheppard, is a trans man.

  As the main story opens, it is 1724 and Sheppard is about to be hanged as a thief and “gaolbreaker.” His tale, these “confessions,” take us from the gallows back to his youth, when he was sold into a slave-like apprenticeship, and his emergence into manhood, love, and infamy.

  Much of his story is familiar: Sheppard is based on an English folk hero who was the centerpiece of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” which became Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera.” In author Jordy Rosenberg’s hands, however, the story is starkly personal and movingly depicted. In times of crisis, for example when his mother sells him, Sheppard dissociates in a way that any expert in child trauma will recognize: “Jack did his Thames-trick. He had no other choice against the Terror . . . He sent himself floating to cool Depths.”
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  After he survives a brutally primitive mastectomy he describes how his body now conforms more closely to his gender: “The interstice between Jack’s insides and his skin — that chasm of echoing hollow, the miserable Gas that kept him from himself, and from the world, had been closed.’’

  Voth’s situation is much less dramatic. Laboring for a Big Brother-like university that has a dean of surveillance, he is disciplined, at first, for playing Scrabble on his phone. “You owe your workplace eighty hours of labor restitution,” he is told, even as he rationalizes his misuse of office hours: “No one really wants to talk about the eighteenth century more than they already have to.”

  Before long, he is put on unpaid leave and then approached by a corporate entity that wants to buy his find, the “mashed and mildewed pile of papers” that contains Sheppard’s story.

  The implication is that this has all been a setup, and before long Voth realizes he has been played: Broke and threatened with legal action, he must get to work preparing the manuscript for his new masters, who seek to exploit the salacious qualities of the “earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs known to history.”

  Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems, and both the timid Voth and the intrepid Sheppard may have cards yet to play.

  This setup isn’t entirely new. Both Sarah Waters (most notably in “Fingersmith”) and Michel Faber (“The Crimson Petal and the White”) have set novels in a Victorian London underworld with a modern eye toward gender and sexuality, working on the assumption that people haven’t actually changed much over the centuries. As Waters and Faber did, Rosenberg peppers his prose with thieves’ cant, much of it erotic, which in its range and specificity (most of it unreproduceable in a family newspaper) gives credence to this idea. The slang bolsters the period setting but does requires explication in footnotes — where we are introduced to Voth and his much less dashing saga, the academic satire that sets “Confessions’’ apart.

  That this innovative hybrid works is a testament to Rosenberg, who teaches 18th century literature and queer/trans theory at UMass Amherst. Like Voth, Rosenberg identifies as transgender. (Sheppard never uses this word.) Unlike Voth, Rosenberg is never pedantic. Even while he (his chosen pronoun) has Voth going on and on in his footnotes, showing off his erudition, Rosenberg spices his main story — that of the outlaw lovers — with sly allusions to both his areas of expertise. The typographical tricks that, in 1759, will set off Laurence Sterne’s novel “Tristram Shandy” pop up alongside arguments from gender theory about desire and body dimorphism, while hat-tips to other authors abound.

  While it is not necessary to the enjoyment of the book, recognition of these allusions can serve as clues and enrich both tales. Take the strange and seemingly all-encompassing company that approaches Voth: P-QUAD. The acronym is never explained, but once it has been read aloud, any reader of Melville’s 1851 masterwork will know to expect a bad ending.

  Sometimes, those allusions have the reader second guessing. Would an underworld colleague of Sheppard’s really have had access to (and been able to read) Daniel Defoe’s 1722 “A Journal of the Plague Year”? Even though Bess has spent time in the Dutch republic, where modern financial practices were founded, would a sex worker really use the word “securitizational” in conversation (“the first known usage,” as Voth notes)? Are these clues that Voth should have picked up on — ones indicating that this manuscript is a modern forgery? Or are they Rosenberg’s subtle dig at the reader, upending our prejudices so that we can, just maybe, appreciate these otherwise marginalized characters for who they are? A bibliography closes this novel, for anyone who wants to explore further. For readers simply seeking a ripping yarn, this volume alone will suffice.

  CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX

  By Jordy Rosenberg

  One World, 352 pp., $27

  Clea Simon is a Somerville novelist. She can be reached at www.cleasimon.com
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• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/621037857/an-academic-adventure-goes-awry-in-confessions-of-the-fox
  Word count: 726

  An Academic Adventure Goes Awry In 'Confessions Of The Fox'
  June 26, 20187:00 AM ET

  Genevieve Valentine
  Confessions of the Fox
  Confessions of the Fox

  by Jordy Rosenberg

  Hardcover, 336 pages
  purchase

  In some version of our maybe-present, professor R. Voth gets his hands on a moldering manuscript nobody in his university library seems to want. Voth ("a guy by design, not birth") soon discovers he's inherited the autobiographical "confessions" of notorious thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard and his lover Edgeworth Bess, and sets about attempting to add some academic footnotes.

  Things do not go to plan.

  In fact, things not going to plan is a tension at the heart of Confessions of the Fox, a debut novel that's fascinated with the the power of a little chaos, for freedom's sake, in the face of the kind of commodification — of people, of sexuality, of identity, of knowledge, of stories — that threatens to suffocate life itself. There's a sense of revolutionary entropy, whether it's barreling down upon us in the present or calling back from the relative safety of the past.

  The Jack of these memoirs is a trans man whose identity is an ongoing negotiation with loved ones, the body politic, and himself. His lover Bess, whose father is Indian, weathers innumerable slights because of her descent, and is thwarted just as often by friends and family who disbelieve her experience as by strangers primed to hate her. Their love is transformative and fiercely queer, but a happy ending's not a narrative guarantee. And everywhere, the London around them swarms with the sort of privatization and militarization that makes new enemies when it's consumed the old ones. (A note on a sea captain's downfall sums it up tidily: "And yet, his greed, etc.")

  ... things not going to plan is a tension at the heart of 'Confessions of the Fox,' a debut novel that's fascinated with the the power of a little chaos, for freedom's sake..

  The story plays liberally with the weight of fact against the supernatural power of story — quite literally, sometimes. But Rosenberg is clearly a scholar, and Dr. Voth's citations are deeply engaged with the various violences within the story, from colonialism to medical experimentation. (Don't be surprised if you accumulate a reading list from those footnotes.) But some of the strangest violence happens to Voth himself, as his passion project becomes a battlefield.

  Confessions of the Fox benefits greatly from the clear and present danger to its narrator, as Voth tries to navigate academia via the Dean of Surveillance, and ends up with his work co-opted — and later coerced — by a cheerfully sinister all-caps bureaucrat from P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals (one of them an unclear subsidiary of the other) who takes ownership of the manuscript, and who increasingly tries to take patronizing, sensationalizing ownership of archival authority, the story, and Voth himself. (Mmm, capitalism.) This all-too-feasible tension makes the footnotes more than just a stylistic touch; given the conditions under which Voth is attempting to discern the truth, there's increasing tension in what he says, or can't say, that sometimes eclipses the drama unfolding in the manuscript.
  An 18th Century, Gender-Bending Mystery: What Did 'The Fox' Say?
  Author Interviews
  An 18th Century, Gender-Bending Mystery: What Did 'The Fox' Say?

  Rosenberg is well-versed in 18th-century literature, and the text has several formal markers from that era, from sublime communion with nature to nested storytelling featuring ill-fated sea voyages and colonial avarice. But don't expect much pastiche in this prose; Rosenberg's phrasing is unflaggingly modern, despite the many missing 'e's. Perhaps it was more important to have a unified cadence for the novel's essential concerns: How the powerful will try to control whatever they can touch, and the necessity — and joy — of fighting.

  There are some flourishes to this story that don't fit quite as well into the novel's interior conversation as they could, but Confessions of the Fox is an ambitious debut, and its exploration of this "impossible, ghostly archaeology" will have you looking askance at tidy histories — which feels like just what Jack and Bess would want.

  Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.
  https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/621037857/an-academic-adventure-goes-awry-in-confessions-of-the-fox

• HUffington Post
  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/author-jordy-rosenberg-confessions-fox-trans-historical-fiction_us_5b1992e0e4b0adfb82672b16
  Word count: 2074

  The Impossible Dream Of Jordy Rosenberg
  The trans scholar and author knows a novel can’t fix the world’s sociopolitical woes. But that doesn’t mean he can’t try.
  headshot
  By Claire Fallon
  Photo illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; photo: Beowulf Sheehan/One World

  The star of Jordy Rosenberg’s debut novel, Confessions of the Fox, might be familiar to you already. Jack Sheppard, a legendary 18th century pickpocket and jailbreaker, operated for only about a year before being hanged for his crimes. But in that short span, his madcap spate of robberies and subsequent daring escapes from prison enthralled the working-class population of London. An immediate folk hero, he was immortalized in theatrical works by John Gay and, later, Bertolt Brecht.

  Rosenberg, who teaches 18th century literature and queer/trans theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, felt the same inexorable draw to fictionalize Sheppard’s life as have many artists. “It’s actually not a unique thought that there’s a novel of his life,” he told me as we sat in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the city.

  But drawing from his study of London in the 18th century, and from personal experience, Rosenberg knew that he wanted to do something different with the fascinating figure. Or, rather, lots of different things. Confessions is a historical novel, but it’s also speculative fiction, metafiction and a political argument.

  And the figure at its heart, Jack Sheppard, is, in Rosenberg’s fictional world, a trans man.

  Rosenberg, who is trans himself, recalled that most publishers were far more eager to publish a possible memoir about his experience as a trans man than a speculative historical novel featuring a trans character.

  “The thirst for my book to be a memoir rather than fiction was very powerful and palpable,” he said. But he was uncomfortable with the demand for memoir ― specifically, from the perspective of a white trans man ― which he sees as not only potentially soliciting self-objectification (a new iteration of the proto-scientific case study genre that often treated non-gender-conforming people as specimens), but in his case, as centering white voices as authorities on the subject. He ultimately published the book through One World, a Random House imprint focused on marginalized authors and genre-bending works.

  “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,” he explained. “The language and literature is one way. It’s not the only or even the primary way. But we also have to fight for the ability to write fiction and to write stories that are themselves speculative and unreal…. We can resist this self-objectifying case study model.”

  Art, he’s deeply aware, can easily reiterate and enshrine political oppression ― the novel being no more exempt from doing so than memoir. In writing Confessions of the Fox, he hoped to unite art with other imperatives: historical illumination, political advocacy and, of course, unabashed fun. “It was a balancing act,” he told me. “I really wanted to make a book that was entertaining, but then I also was trying to balance it with a lot of historical and political commitments.”

  He wanted to write a “sexy, political” novel about Sheppard. And it is both very sexy and very political, though not exactly equivalent to a placard waved at a street demonstration. It’s a rollicking yarn with a thread of tender first love, a page-turning tale of 18th century devilry. It’s a book that’s just as interested in its political messages as it is in its craft and narrative, and, unlike most books of this ilk, it’s compelling on each level.
  One World

  The novel takes the form of a found manuscript, the apparently genuine memoirs of Sheppard himself. It follows a young Sheppard, raised a girl, as he escapes from an apprenticeship to an abusive carpenter and remakes himself as a man of the streets. He meets Bess, a sex worker who becomes his lover and partner in crime, and he pulls off heists and carouses with a motley assortment of low-level criminals. He has a preternatural ability to wriggle out of tight spots ― his escapes in the novel, like his infamous breakout of Newgate Prison, were drawn closely from historical documents of the real Sheppard.

  Rosenberg sees Sheppard’s crimes, in themselves, as a political statement. The escape artist has been a populist hero since the beginning, a figure of defiance in the face of state violence and policing of the poor and marginalized. “Sheppard was repeatedly jailed for minor property crimes that, at the time, carried a capital punishment,” Rosenberg said. Through his daring escapes and incorrigible crime spree, “he became a very important emblem of resistance to forms of consumer capitalism, to the birth of the police state.”

  The London of Confessions of the Fox is not the London many readers will recognize from popular historical fiction. “One of the problems with a lot of historical fiction about London in the 18th century is that it’s imagined by white authors to be a uniformly white city, and we know this just isn’t true,” he told me. “I wanted it to be historically true to the intersection of forces that we know were real and are real.” This involved reimagining certain characters as people of color: Bess becomes Bess Khan, the daughter of a white Englishwoman and a Southeast Asian sailor.

  Rosenberg was wary of the straightforward strategy of simply making the characters diverse. “My feeling was that the question of representation could not be left to the level of content alone,” he told me, “but that this question of a white author representing characters of color, which I find to be a very contradictory and complicated and, I’m sure ultimately on many levels, necessarily failed project of mine, that it was going to have to influence the form of the novel as well.”
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  He introduced layers of self-critique: Rosenberg frames Sheppard’s narrative as a found first-person text being annotated by a renegade trans scholar, Dr. Voth, who believes the work to be Sheppard’s own memoirs ― a theory that is repeatedly complicated over the course of the novel. In footnotes, Dr. Voth provides historical background and critical references but also shares his dating woes and clashes with the university administration. Rosenberg calls Voth “both the most memoiristic and the most character-driven” figure in the novel; by presenting a fictionalized, flawed version of himself, he builds in an awareness of his own privileges and shortcomings as an author, and ours as readers. The book continually teaches us to question our own comfortable notions of the Western canon, European history and the role of literature.

  And yet Rosenberg isn’t entirely satisfied. “You can issue self-critique, and there is self-critique issued in it, but it still doesn’t resolve the historical contradictions of capitalism and racism. If you could, someone would just write a book that says, like, ‘Capitalism is over.’ And that would be the one sentence, and that’d be the end of the book.”

  You can issue self-critique, and there is self-critique issued in it, but it still doesn’t resolve the historical contradictions of capitalism and racism. If you could, someone would just write a book that says, like, “Capitalism is over.” And that would be the one sentence, and that’d be the end of the book. Jordy Rosenberg

  Some of the impasses he found himself at seemed irresoluble. How could he write about the full range of a trans man’s experience, including sex (again, it is a very sexy novel), without “soliciting a prurient gaze” toward Jack and, for that matter, Bess? In attempts to avoid voyeuristic lingering over their bodies, he found himself writing terrible sex scenes entirely represented through metaphors, like a storm cloud sweeping through. Something had to give. In the end, he avoided explicit descriptions of their bodies but found gentle ways to sketch out the act of sex.

  The inability to fully resolve these problems, Rosenberg said, “would sometimes cause me to want to be faithful to certain aesthetic questions.” Instead of consistently grappling with the horrors of capitalism, cisnormativity and racism, “Sometimes I would just come up with this feeling that the best that I could do was to try to make something that would keep a reader company at night.”

  Confessions of the Fox could feel conflicted, even Frankensteined, by all of the author’s competing priorities. Instead, it’s seamlessly integrated into something more than the sum of its parts. The historical and political critiques infuse the musty period prose with fresh urgency and unconventional narrative twists. Rosenberg’s suspicion of the novel’s roots in a capitalistic, racist culture has somehow propelled him into writing a particularly brilliant one.

  Since the election of Donald Trump, many in the literary community have been at pains to argue for the continued relevance of their craft ― that now, more than ever, literature and art serve a vital purpose in promoting human rights, free speech and progressive ideals. Despite the heavy dose of politics in Confessions of the Fox, Rosenberg isn’t entirely convinced. Art, he argues throughout our conversation, is neither separate from politics nor sufficient to changing it.

  Last year, as Trump’s hastily implemented travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries was met with massive airport protests and street demonstrations, Rosenberg watched the ghastly scene unfold from his hospital bed.

  It was the last place he wanted to be at that historical moment. Rosenberg had recently had a hysterectomy ― “partially for gender-confirming reasons and partially not” ― and had suffered complications. In any situation, the ensuing ordeal would have been miserable: He was restricted to his bed for at least a month and dealt with complications even longer. Rosenberg was in the final stages of revising the novel. His illness gummed up the publication schedule.

  And taking part in a protest march? Infuriatingly, that was out of the question.

  “At that moment, I thought, ‘Fuck. I don’t want to write any more books,’” Rosenberg told me. “‘I don’t want to do anything that means I have to be inside anymore, tied to a computer. All I want, all I want is to be outside with people resisting this.’”

  Rosenberg harbored an ambivalent stance toward writing fiction before that. Though Confessions of the Fox is his debut, he said, he’s been “writing novels and throwing them away since my late 20s ― so, for about 17 years.” He wasn’t throwing them in the garbage for lack of commercial interest; several of the binned works had literary agents. Yet often, he said, “by the time I was at the end of it, I would disagree with the premise of the novel.” Unwilling to stand behind the book, he’d “denounce it” and move on to a new project instead.

  But he never soured on Confessions of the Fox, though he’s been working on it, on and off, since 2009. Perhaps, Rosenberg speculated, because he’s “just become entrenched in my current political positions” ― the threads of anti-capitalism and anti-racism that run through the work still matter to him profoundly. And, despite his crises of confidence, he believes fiction, however flawed and insufficient, has its place.

  “Writing and activism are not the same thing, but there’s a relationship between them that I’m continually interested in.” Being hospitalized during the spasm of anti-Muslim-ban protests didn’t finally kill his interest in writing, but it did change it. “It just made me keep thinking about how to make writing come out of being in the world, and being in struggle.”

  CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reflect a change in a character’s name that was instituted after review copies were sent to critics. Bess Dev is now Bess Khan.
  RELATED COVERAGE

• Entertainment Weekly
  https://ew.com/books/2018/06/27/jordy-rosenberg-interview-confessions-of-the-fox/
  Word count: 1619

  How Jordy Rosenberg turned a historical myth into a queer hero for the ages
  Beowulf Sheehan
  placeholder
  David Canfield
  June 27, 2018 at 06:45 PM EDT

  Jordy Rosenberg’s debut novel is an ambitious work of metafiction, a sexy queer love story, and a rigorously researched and argued piece of scholarship, all rolled into one.

  This is partly by design: Confessions of the Fox is nothing if not ambitious, moving back and forth in time over hundreds of years and increasingly stuffed with footnotes which complicate the narrative. The novel reimagines the myth of Jack Sheppard, a notorious 18th-century thief with a checkered past. In the present day, an academic named Dr. Voth (who strongly resembles Rosenberg himself) discovers a manuscript about Sheppard and his lover, Edgeworth Bess, that chronicles their adventures: moving through queer subcultures, defying gender norms, and coming up against a newly established police force.

  Voth begins digging through the manuscript intensely, looking for clues and context as to whether it is autobiography, fiction, or something else entirely. It’s reflective of Rosenberg’s own experience writing the novel: He too became obsessed with Sheppard’s story the more he learned about it. Indeed, it’s not far off from his area of expertise: Rosenberg, who is trans, is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory.

  Confessions of the Fox is a bold first novel, unwieldy but accessible, and layered but thrilling. It’s already been lavished with praise by the likes of NPR and The New Yorker, an especially notable trend given that the book is the first work of fiction from a new imprint: Chris Jackson’s One World, of Random House, whose mission is to elevate marginalized voices.

  Prior to publication, Rosenberg spoke with EW about the motivation behind the book, balancing academic intrigue with literary storytelling, and bolstering trans visibility. Read on for our conversation below, and purchase your copy of Confessions of the Fox here.
  One World

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is your world that you’re writing about, in terms of your research. But what drew you to the story of Jack Sheppard for a novel, and telling it in such a layered way?
  JORDY ROSENBERG: I was heading out on a fellowship at UCLA in the archive — they have a little archive off-campus, of 18th-century and 17th-century primary documents — to do research there. I had the year to do research, and I’d become a little bit fixated on what I knew about Sheppard. In addition to [John] Gay’s [The Beggar’s] Opera, there was a a lot of random material written about him that is often quoted or referenced in the book: newspaper broadsides, a lot of speculation about him at the time — what you could call tabloid coverage now — and then even after he died, there were fictional things written as if he’d written from the afterlife. From all of this material, in so much of it he was represented in a very genderqueer way — very feminized. I became obsessed with this idea of literalizing the way that he’s been represented as genderqueer — it was represented as very integral to his ability to be a great countercultural hero, preternaturally able to get into and out of spaces. At one point, I describe him as an artist of transgression. He was really represented that way. I just became obsessed with this idea of writing his story and really taking seriously the extent to which he was loved as this genderqueer hero.

  Dr. Voth seems modeled on you to some extent. Is there any element of autobiography or metafiction there, in terms of what he’s trying to do here?
  That character is very close to my heart. He’s a transgender scholar, obviously, and he’s working at a university feeling the pinch of the politics of austerity in the 21st century. Obviously there are things that are very fictionalized about Voth, and I felt very free to make Voth’s voice as unhinged as I wanted to. That was something that I was really supported in by Chris Jackson, the publisher of One World. I had gone back and forth about Voth a lot; earlier iterations of the manuscript featured very little of his voice in the footnotes. Halfway through the editing process, I had a long night of the soul where I realized all these great works of metafiction — where you have an editor character in the footnotes, like Pale Fire or Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, which Tisa Bryant, the chair of the MFA writing program at CalArts [and] a queer author with her own new book coming out in the fall, Residual, [helped] direct me to. In these books, you have to know who this editor character is; you can’t just really have an editorial voice that isn’t a character. So I had to think about who he really was. I just wrote him in an intense burst.

  A core element of this novel is this idea of Jack’s story “belonging” to the queer community.
  There’s got to be a winking element to it, right? It’s not like you need a password to read a novel. I’ve obviously written it in a way where I want anyone to enter it. This is something I’ve struggled with and thought a lot about — I’ll just be honest, I wanted to write a sexy novel, a sexy work of transgender historical fiction. But there’s something you really have to think through, around, how do you write sexy trans fiction without tipping over into writing for a prurient reader? At first, I was trying to write in a way that protected trans embodiment and our bodies. Then I started to think about the intimacy of novels in general, and the intimacy of language. At a certain point, I just thought, “I need to write toward my most generous reader — whoever that reader is.” If they’re trans, genderqueer, identify as cis, whoever they are, I wanted to be able to write to them. At certain points, the novel obviously says, “I’m just talking to you.” But I don’t really know who that “you” is. That’s the thing about fiction. 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.

  It’s interesting, because you mentioned the way Voth comes up against austerity, and there’s also commentary here on mass incarceration, radicalization. There’s a balance between fun, sexy queer storytelling and something that’s more polemical too.
  There’s this phrase that I kept thinking about while I was writing the book; it has to do with speculative myth. Something like, “Some unrealities we fight for, and some we fight against.” There are certain forms of unreality that are forced upon marginalized groups — the unreality of our lives, the unreality of our ability to have self-determined identities. Not just for trans people, but across ranges of oppression. I wanted to metabolize some of that painful unreality. Instead of insisting on a realistic counterpoint to go deeper into experience, I wanted to think about the relationship between pain and struggle — does pain have a friendly demon that keeps you company? [Laughs]

  I was interested, in this book, to look at the very long history of unequal distribution of visibility and violence [among trans people]. For me, it was impossible to write a transgender novel that wasn’t rooted in the historical intersection of embodiment, and transgender embodiment more specifically. In 18th-century Britain, you get the birth of London’s first municipal police force, the birth of British imperialism. These things are all interconnected. I set myself the goal of trying to write a novel that was about that. And also was about forms of resistance to those interconnections.

  This is one of the first novels by a transgender author to be published by a major company. Given the early positive reception, what’s the feeling for you right now?
  I have absolutely no idea what to expect, and I’m just trying to be completely open toward whatever. I think it might sound kind of corny, but to me, the most exciting thing is finding this imprint, One World, which is all about raising marginalized voices and finding a place in publishing for them. I just can’t believe what’s happening to me. Whatever happens with the reception of the book, the fact that I got to work with One World just blew my mind. My agent is probably still getting over the hardships I gave her. When I found out they were interested, I think at one point I said to her, “Oh my God, I would do this for them for free.” She just was like, “Don’t…” [Laughs] But that was truly my feeling, to have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with editors in this larger collective effort was so exciting. An amazing experience. And to be a part of an existing world of trans literature — maybe not previously among major U.S. publishers — is very exciting too.

  This interview has been edited and condensed.

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