Yr Dead

Now in paperback! Winner of the 2025 IPPY Award for literary fiction. Longlisted for the National Book Award. Named a top debut novel of 2024 by Kirkus, and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist.

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra’s ever loved, every place they’ve felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that’s decided on this final act of protest.

Told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography, Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is the electric debut novel from award-winning writer Sam Sax, one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.

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