330 pages
Published 2018
Read from June 9 to June 19
Rating: 5 out of 5
I can feel it within the whorls and innermost arrangement of my being: this book has changed me.
I’ve wanted to write something like this book for a very long time. For at least a decade now I’ve been planning, however desultorily, a low fantasy novel about a gender-expansive rogue (most likely a trans man, or a person we might assign to that category within our current taxonomy of gender) whose heists and contacts within the underbelly of a London-esque city bring him to the forefront of a proletariat revolution against the aristocrats and capitalists of an early modern England analogue.
From a nearly identical starting point, Rosenberg, using Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess as our entry into historical 18th Century London, has produced a work of revolutionary reality and queer intensity that I could never dream of matching, a metafictional masterpiece all the more urgent as our modern forces of fascism and vulture capitalism slouch toward genocide and the destruction of our biosphere. It is a radical document of liberation, an illustration of the historical roots and modern-day reach of the Western commodification of person and existence.
By our very queerness, we reject and disrupt the capitalist commodification forced upon our bodies. I don’t have the grounding in academic thought that Rosenberg lavished upon this novel, but this is a truth I feel within my mitochondria.
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