Night Night Fawn

From the author of Confessions of the Fox comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed gives an unrepentant account of all her failures--including her child.

＂From one of our most fearless living novelists comes this extraordinary book. No half measures here, just big ideas and living characters and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise.＂--Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenberg is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. She has opinions about her smutty late husband, her career as the receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon, her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser, and her failed aspirations to be a film noir actress. But what she really wants to talk about are unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Zionism, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara finds herself in a nightmare from which she cannot escape, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates--or are they avenging nemeses?--once again.

Part novel, part someone’s mother’s unauthorized memoir--all diatribe, gutter schtick, and deranged manifesto, Night Night Fawn is a ferociously candid account of intergenerational conflict.

Jordy Rosenberg is the author of the novel Confessions of the Fox, which was a New York Times Editors Choice selection, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, the UK Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award, and longlisted for The Dublin Literary Award, and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature, and others. Jordy’s work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Lannan Foundation, The Banff Centre, The Ahmanson-Getty Foundation, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. He is a professor in the Department of English and Associated MFA Faculty in the Program for Poets and Writers at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.