Works by
Wayne Koestenbaum
(Poet, Writer)

Audio

• Andy Warhol (1001) with J. Critt, narrator
  In his bravura account of Warhol's life and work, scholar and culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum gets past the contradictions and reveals the man behind the blond wig and dark glasses. 6 cds library edition.

Fiction

• Hotel Theory (2007)
  Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel (Hotel Women) featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum’s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books — one fiction, one nonfiction — run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. Hotel Theory gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing — in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest — arises in this dazzling work.

• Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel (2004)
  Pianist Theo Mangrove's planned comeback is imminent, but he's losing his nerve. While restlessly counting down the days until a performance in the French town of Aigues-Mortes, he becomes strangely convinced that Moira Orfei, a 1960s Italian circus queen, must perform with him. As he begins to turn his displaced creativity and relentless sexual energy on a series of male hustlers, random strangers, and music students, Theo wonders whether he will be able to channel his passions into one final celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by pianists, prostitutes, muses, and manipulators, this debut novel by noted poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum hums with obsessive energy and examines one artist's choices at the crossroads of sex, death, and creativity.

Non-fiction

• Amy Sillman - Works on Paper (2006), Text by Wayne Koestenbaum
  Works on Paper marks the first major publication of the work of noted New York painter Amy Sillman, whose rapidly growing reputation and increasingly recognized influence on other artists make its timing ideal. Her paintings and drawings are at once narrative and decorative, filled with quirky figures and diminutive, patterned elements. Her works on paper, which she considers particularly central to her art-making practice and her wider portfolio, are often made up of multiple components. They create the feeling of an extended and meandering sequence of events, and have been described as reminiscent of both film loops and long letters to her viewers. Works on Paper consists of four major series of Sillmanís drawings, all recent and documented by brilliant full-color photographs. It also includes an essay by acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum, who has long been celebrated for both his poetry and prose, and who has become one of our most innovative and influential writers on contemporary art and culture. His lavish, seductive and humorous writing style is the perfect complement to Sillmanís lyrical works. This book is a delightful introduction to a rising star.

• Andy Warhol (2001)
  The sixties were the "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll" era, and Andy Warhol was its cultural icon. Painter, filmmaker, photographer, philosopher, Warhol was both celebrity and celebrant, the man who put the "pop" in art. His studio, The Factory, where his free-spirited cast of "superstars" mingled with the rich and famous, was ground zero for the explosions that rocked American cultural life. And yet for all his fame, Warhol was an enigma: a participant in the excesses of his time who remained a faithful churchgoer, a nearly inarticulate man who was also a great aphorist ("In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes"), an artist whose body of work sizzles with sexuality but whose own body was a source of shame and self-hatred.
  
  In his bravura account of Warhol's life and work, scholar and culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum gets past the contradictions and reveals the man beneath the blond wig and dark glasses. Nimbly weaving brilliant and witty analysis into an absorbing narrative, Koestenbaum makes a convincing case for Warhol as a serious artist, one whose importance goes beyond the sixties. Focusing on Warhol's provocative, powerful films (many of which have been out of circulation since their initial release), Koestenbaum shows that Warhol's oeuvre, in its variety of form (films, silkscreens, books, "happenings"), maintains a striking consistency of theme: Warhol discovered in classic American images (Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, Marilyn's face) a secret history, the erotic of time and space.

• Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics  (2000)
  In this brilliantly shrewd, hilarious collection of essays, cultural critic and acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum exposes all that provokes, intimidates, heartens, and arouses us in matters of style, celebrity, obscenity, and art.
  
  Armed with a bold curiosity, a stinging wit, and a subversive sense of wordplay, Koestenbaum reflects on a dazzling array of subjects. Here are the outsized emotions inflamed by Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, and locker-room nudity . . . vivid dreams of flirting with Bill Clinton and resurrecting Bette Davis from the dead . . . the intangible joys of thrifting . . . the true meaning of masculinity . . . and the indelible sensation that two scoops of vanilla flesh, heaving incongruously in a 70-millimeter musical, made on a young boy of impressionable age.
  
  From the rigors of a day spent with Melanie Griffith ("Melanie Time") to the healing powers of a gray Prada suit ("Diary of a Suit") to moving meditations on the importance of reading ("Why I Read"), this volume is an irresistible exploration of culture and identity in America. If celebrity is--as Koestenbaum suggests--an earthquake, then Cleavage is the aftershock.

• Jackie under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (1995)

• The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993, 2001) -- Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award
  This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty mélange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates mysteries of fandom and obsession, and has created an exuberant work of personal meditation and cultural history.

• Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989)

Poetry

• Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems (2006)

• Model Homes (2004)
  Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet's present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements.

• The Milk of Inquiry (1999)
  More meditative, more provocative than his previous, much-praised work, The Milk of Inquiry is Koestenbaum's strongest collection to date. Its most ambitious gesture is a long poem, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," a sequence of 115 bawdy, speedy sonnets, spoken by mythological figures ghosting as historical personages-among them, Orpheus speaking as Elvis, Proserpina speaking as Freud, Adonis speaking as Cleopatra, and Daphne speaking as Wilde. Short lyrics that show this opulent writer at his most austere and a long autobiographical poem round out the collection.

• Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender: Poems (1994)

• Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems (1990)

Other

• Contemporary Erotic Drawing (2005)

• Male/Female: 105 Photographs (1999)
  Includes an essay by Wayne Koestenbaum

• A. Neel: Paintings from the Thirties (1997), Wayne Koestenbaum, ed.

See also:

• Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures (2005), Klaus Biesenbach, Laurence Kardish, and Mary Lea Bandy, eds.
  Prolific, mercurial, thought-provoking, charming, engaging, dynamic, confusing--just like the artist himself, Andy Warhol's films explore the gamut of human emotion. From the time he obtained his first film camera in 1963, up until his death in 1987, Warhol explored and created moving images ranging from epic films, to personal portraits, to programs for cable television, to music videos. In fact, in a mere five years (1963-1968) he produced nearly 650 films including hundreds of silent screen tests--portrait films--and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial "sexploitation." His films and videos capture the rich and raw texture of the fertile cultural milieu in which he lived and worked, and are crucial to the understanding of Warhol's work in other media. Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist's screen tests and non-narrative films from 1963-73. Within it we see sequences of his "most beautiful women"--screen tests featuring "Baby" Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Edie Sedgwick--and other works that showcase a parade of friends, actors, and models--Dennis Hopper, Gerhard Malanga, and Walter Burn to name just a few. This collection of tests is followed by the artist's non-narrative films including Eat, Sleep, Kiss, and Blow Job. All of the artist's film works are enhanced by texts from Mary Lea Bandy, Klaus Biesenbach, and others. The worlds of art, photography, film, criticism, lifestyle, and fashion unite in Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, as 200 fascinating, full-bleed, remarkably clear, black and white stills provide access into territories both familiar and unexplored.

• Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing (2004)
  Living up to its title, Wonderlands comes fueled by wanderlust and features every kind of wonderland. In fact, the collection's contributors--a mix of established gay writers and the best of the new generation--don't settle for the obvious. Focusing on the sheer visceral thrill of travel, the adventure of it, they set out all over the world and always find something unexpected: love, passion, history, themselves. 
  
  The result is an anthology of dynamic writing that will motivate readers to book their next flight, or at least get them dreaming of other places. And the places are legion. Mack Friedman sets off into the deceptively butch wilds of Alaska. Robert Tewdwr Moss tracks through the back roads of Syria and his own version of Arabian Nights. Colm Tóibín discovers a Spanish Brigadoon and Edward Field drinks tea with Paul Bowles. For Wayne Koestenbaum Vienna is both a city of high low culture, and for Philip Gambone Asia becomes a place of second chances. Raphael Kadushin settles into the ethereal sun of a Dutch spring, Michael Lowenthal remembers a jarring encounter in the Scottish Highlands, and Tim Miller tallies the 1001 beds he has slept in all over the world. And Edmund White, in a classic of elegiac travel writing, recounts his harrowing drive through the Sahara with a man he loved.
  
  Contributors: Alistair McCartney, Boyer Rickel, Brian Bouldrey, Bruce Shenitz, Colm Tóibín, David Masello, Edmund White, Edward Field, J.S. Marcus, Mack Friedman, Matthew Link, Michael Lowenthal, Mitch Cullin, Philip Gambone, Raphael Kadushin, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Robert Tewdwr Moss, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Tim Miller.