Yr Dead

Longlist, National Book Awards 2024 for Fiction

ISBN 9781952119996
McSweeney's
Sam Sax

Sam Sax is the author of Pig and Yr Dead; as well as Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series; and bury it, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta, and elsewhere. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

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.

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