Figure It Out EPUB

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Whatever his subject—favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara—the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . Ditch your inner chaperone, he implores. Breach the cordon sanitaire in your mind . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . He crushes on evasion and ambiguity, but his own prose has always been distinguished by its tautness and agility . . . There is a feeling of watching a writer so allergic to cliché now interrogating his own moves, annotating his own clichés with diligent, affectionate exasperation. Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence." ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"A book of essays that audit a series of extremely indulgent, largely beautiful, mostly dissociated objects of fascination . . . Koestenbaum has installed himself in a pantheon of loopily scrupulous authors like Susan Sontag, Michel de Montaigne and Maggie Nelson—writers who take their knuckles around the heart of a passing subject and tenderly squeeze them of their juices." ––Mina Tavokali, The Washington Post

"Pervy and diverting." –New York magazine's Approval Matrix "Highbrow/Brilliant"

"As fun a book of criticism as you’re likely to find . . . Few critics are so playful, so irreverent, and so refreshing." ––Colin Groundwater, GQ

"Tasting a word, inhaling a disagreement, melting syntax—these are skills you can learn from Wayne. He has mastered the combination of category and kind, and can instantly widen a particulate filter . . . Maybe you don’t know what you’re most interested in, not yet. Curiosity is the match under Koestenbaum’s year-round yule log. Words as yeasty, generative seeds. Fulsome tunnels. Perfervid bun traps. Let’s go!" ––Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum

"Every passage is a carnival of confident poses and wry transgression, blending scholarly diction and voluptuary seediness . . . Koestenbaum’s work often seems so unchained, so free, that it feels like it was written joyfully, without a trace of strain." ––Zachary Fine, Art in America

"Koestenbaum’s essays actively analyze and move like investigations, encouraging readers to follow along like Watson to Holmes . . . The essays are engaging, and it becomes an adventure to follow Koestenbaum’s playful and occasionally raunchy train of thought." ––Alex Tunney, Lambda Literary

"Koestenbaum’s writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. Cutting a silhouette around white space with his longtime preoccupations of art, desire, form, famous people dead and alive, the work in Figure It Out embodies Lukács’s definition of the essay itself as 'an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.' It is in the non-pause that Koestenbaum draws a portrait of a consciousness, free and at its most utterly alive." ––Tracy O'Neill, BOMB, Editor's Choice

"Whether in field-defining works of queer theory or hypnotic rushes of 'trance writing,' Koestenbaum’s polymorphous approach allies giddy curiosity with technical precision. Published by Soft Skull Press, his latest essay collection Figure It Out demonstrates all that is urgent and addictive about Koestenbaum’s writing with essays on futility, celebrity, porn, squeegees and the virtues of disorientation." ––Guy Mackinnon-Little, TANK magazine

"There's a specific kind of derangement that I'm after these days, and it can reliably be found in the work of Wayne Koestenbaum; it's a delirious openness, a willingness to go to those heights rarely reached—and then keep going. Such is the case with his new collection of essays, which all hinge on the idea of the unexpected 'collision,' and then become perfectly unhinged from there, leading to meditations on everything from punctuation to poetic blow jobs to the word 'penis.' A pure delight." ––Refinery29

"Regardless of genre or medium or even subject, to know this avant-garde artist is to love him—for the intensity of his studies, the nuance of his self-reflections, the exactitude of his articulations." ––Megan Volpert, PopMatters

"Whenever I need to hit the reset button on my expectations, Koestenbaum is my touchstone . . . The quality of Koestenbaum’s attention and his ability to delight and surprise is unmatched by any writers I have read. His senses of play and inquiry are often my guiding lights, and Figure It Out offers great benchmarks and springboards for anybody feeling a little rigid about or stuck in a certain way of thinking." ––Megan Volpert, The Rumpus

"Spiraling in structure and dizzyingly varied in theme, the essays are peppered with reveries and fantasies, suggesting a kind of ramble through Koestenbaum’s consciousness . . . There’s fun and games and erudition throughout." ––Publishers Weekly

"This kind of prose could be overly chaotic in the hands of a lesser writer, but Koestenbaum has a knack for mostly keeping things together with sincerity, surprises, and wit." ––Kirkus Reviews

"No matter the focus, Koestenbaum proceeds with an agile, sidling insouciance . . . It is his unswerving commitment to his own taste and instinct that allows him so much insight into the works of others who are equally committed to their affinities and practices. What he beautifully observes about poet Adrienne Rich might just as well be said of him: 'Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body.'" ––Booklist

“'Imagine, then, an ecology of language,' Wayne Koestenbaum writes. He creates one of magical abundance here. Instincts and insights flourish, as do ideas and sensations. He speculates, he cogitates, he provokes and delights. He's a scamp, he’s a seer, and he’s a virtuoso." —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland