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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They're the author of PIG, Madness, and Bury It. Sam has received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and Yaddo, and is currently serving as an Italic Lecturer at Stanford University.
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In August 2022 I received an email asking if I would like to read Sam Sax's debut novel with an eye towards possibly becoming the book's editor. I said yes immediately, and read Yr Dead later that day in a single sitting. The book, which takes place entirely in the span of time between when Ezra, the protagonist of the novel, lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies, is told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography. It's a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming-of-age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present.
While reading the book I met everyone Ezra ever loved, every place they ever felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place. Parts of the novel read like past lives or fables, and other parts read like text messages. While the forms of the vignettes vary greatly, the texture of the prose is always lush, felt, and searingly empathetic. Yr Dead is visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic. It's been a tremendous honor to be this book's editor, and a deep pleasure to get to talk about the book, and its many brilliances, with Sam these past two years.
In advance of the book being published this August, I was delighted that Sam ...
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