{"product_id":"cheerful-scapegoat-book-wayne-koestenbaum-9781635901443","title":"The Cheerful Scapegoat","description":"\u003cb\u003eWayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in \u003ci\u003eThe Cheerful Scapegoat\u003c\/i\u003e are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of \u003ci\u003eThe Cheerful Scapegoat\u003c\/i\u003e, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable souffl . \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eKoestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49577223979281,"sku":"GOR011830983","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50284432851217,"sku":"CIN1635901448G","price":4.39,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51330528444689,"sku":"CIN1635901448VG","price":4.92,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1635901448.jpg?v=1750992624","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/cheerful-scapegoat-book-wayne-koestenbaum-9781635901443","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}