His essays and poems have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays. 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. New projects, forthcoming in 2020, include a book of short fiction, The Cheerful Scapegoat, and an essay collection, Figure It Out. Koestenbaum’s writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. Whatever his subjectfavorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank. What unifies these essays isn’t an exploration of a single subject, as has been the case in Koestenbaum’s monographs, such as Humiliation here, the collection’s title might be read as the writer’s wry, modernist incitement: Figure it out. Buy a cheap copy of Figure It Out: Essays book by Wayne Koestenbaum. What looks like a fissure in a Koestenbaum essay represents a cognitive gesture. Indeed, it isn’t quite fragments that index his signature style but the mental choreography suggested in the intervening schisms. Koestenbaum’s pointillistic method relies upon synapses between text fragments. A recognition of skepticism about.form pulses through Figure It Out-and Koestenbaum’s work writ large.
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