The 18th century Jack Shepard infamous legend has been told a number of times, but not like this before. In this story within a story as a political, social statement, Professor Volt a trans man discovers a diary of Jack's and in making it ready for publication realizes that Jack is trans also. The adventure story of Jack's life is fascinating on its own. However, Rosenberg layers the story with issues regarding freedom, capitalism, cis and trans issues, police brutality, racism, and many more of the social ills of today. He does this by providing extensive references in the footnotes to 2oth century works (many of which I'll admit I haven't read). The backstory of the woes of Volt although used to explain many of these issues was not interesting. In addition, one extended chapter seemed to be a reworking of another novel Three.

I found the work hard to read. I thought it was because of the electronic version of the work which I received from Net Gallery and publisher (Thank you) which lumps all the footnotes at the end of chapters. However, I believe it is just a challenging work.

Having tried no less than half a dozen times to read this book, I finally gave up. It was the language style that got me--too difficult to read what the author intended as if the style of the prose were somehow more important than what it meant to convey. Further, before starting the book was a personal essay on the draw of the book for the author. As a reader, I want to get into the story and -- if it grabs me -- find out about the author's passion. However, to have to wade through this before getting into the story...well, I just found this adding to the amount hard work to get into the book.

Stars for research and intriguing topic. Was disappointed to find the book itself not a good fit for my taste.

This is a wonderfully out-there debut novel—ambitious as hell, smart, and fun. At its surface level the book is a twinned narrative involving a discovered manuscript and a contemporary academic who annotates it heavily (and personally) as he transcribes it. But there's a whole lot more going on, particularly in the manuscript, which is ostensibly a biography of the early 18th-century English folk hero Jack Sheppard—who was the model for Macheath in John Gay's <i>The Beggar's Opera</i> and later Brecht and Weill's <i>Threepenny Opera</i>—and his prostitute/moll Edgworth Bess. But aside from being a rollicking retelling, it's also a queering of the legend: in Jordy Rosenberg's retelling Sheppard is a trans man (as is his modern-day professor Voth), Bess is Southeast Asian, and one of the main characters is a gay black man. But beyond even that set of identity politics, which would be innovative and entertainingly loaded on its own (Rosenberg is a trans man as well), there is a lot of really interesting subtext—on colonialism, big pharma, academia, archival authority, racial and gender identity and rights, industrialism, commodification, medical ethics, slavery, and I'm sure I'm missing something else. You get the idea, though.

For the most part Rosenberg pulls off this hyper-intersectionality, and mainly he keeps the energy rolling along. Voth's personal footnoted drama can wears a little thin at parts, although I'm sure it was written to, and there is some overly neat—and slightly wtf-inducing—consummation of Voth's intellectual odyssey toward the very end. But this is a fun, thoughtful, prickly read. Rosenberg absolutely goes big here, and it's worth your time if you're up for it. (This is not, obviously, a beach read, unless this sounds like your idea of a beach read—it is mine, or would be if I ever got within ten miles of a beach—in which case, have at it.)

Confessions of the Fox has a fascinating premise: a recently heart-broken professor has uncovered and is annotating a long-lost manuscript that exposes the gender-defying true story about two notorious thieves who were lovers in 18th-century London.

Unfortunately, this was just an overly tedious read for me. The seemingly never-ending footnotes acted as a third (or fourth?) plot line, and the back and forth between the notes and the story made it impossible to get immersed at all in any story whatsoever. While this was definitely not my cuppa, it might be appreciated by those who enjoy a more challenging read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with a free digital review copy.

The Professor and the Thief

Dr. Voth, a recently jilted professor, finds a manuscript, Confessions of the Fox, about the life of Jack Shepard, a legendary eighteenth century thief. Voth becomes obsessed with researching the life of Shepard and annotating the manuscript.

P was a young, orphan girl initially sold to a maker of tufted footstools. She escaped and teamed up with Bess, a prostitute, who introduces her to the dark side of London. P falls madly in love with Bess and begins her transformation into Jack Shepard, a notorious thief.

Dr. Voth is also a transgender man which explains some of his obsession with Jack’s story. Voth’s story is told through footnotes to Confessions of the Fox. The footnotes start out dryly academic, but as the work progresses they become more unhinged. In addition to his work on the manuscript, Voth is caught in an academic drama where a large pharmaceutical company is trying to take over the university.

If you’re familiar with Brecht’s Three Penny Opera, you will have a head start on understanding this somewhat arcane book. The story of Jack is the centerpiece of the novel, but as Voth becomes more upset, the footnotes threaten to take over. This is not an easy format to enjoy. You’re trying to keep two story lines going, but one is told only through footnotes. I think it would have been simpler to tell the two stories in alternating chapters.

This story will appeal to you if you’re interested in eighteenth century history, transgender roles, and academia. If you’re disturbed by overt sex, curse words, and slang terms for genitalia, you may not enjoy this book.

I received this book from Net Galley for this review.

An oddity, in the best possible way, but also difficult to review. The simple description is that this novel is a new take on the Jack Sheppard myth, but that implies you have to be familiar with that myth, or at least have read or seen The Beggar's Opera or The Threepenny Opera. It has been 20 years since I read Brecht's take on the infamous English jail-breaker, aka "Mack the Knife", so I didn't remember much about it. I don't think it really matters if you have prior knowledge of any of this. The story is still interesting on its own, even if it means missing out on some of the texture.

The author chooses to frame the story with a parallel plot involving an transgender academic editing a found manuscript that appears to be a confession of Sheppard. The footnotes to the story end up being a story of their own, as an oppressive Dean, and the education corporation pulling the strings, begin to make demands. It's an interesting choice, but to be honest I grew tired of the convention by the third part and wish that the professor's story was just written as aalternating chapters. Part of the problem was reading this as a Kindle doc, rather than a print book. The footnotes were really end notes at the end of each chapter which made going back and forth to read them burdensome and sometimes confusing.

I enjoyed this story and the fresh way it was told. I'm not sure who I would recommend it to. Someone interested or knowledgeable in queer theory and gender studies, as well as economic philosophy, with an appreciation for historical research and writing and the evolution of language. How's that for a niche? It's definitely not for the mass market. But, that's also what I liked about it. Smart writing for people who like to be challenged but also like an old-fashioned adventure story that is anything but old-fashioned.

I have to applaud Jordy Rosenberg for not only breaking away from sexual and gender norms and assumptions, but also presenting London in the 17th Century as having racial diversity. We've been trained to see England as all-white for too long.

Wow. I'm not sure how to review this very complex novel which I wish I had read in hard copy instead of on kindle because of how the story is told. Rosenberg has meshed the stories of two people- Dr. Voth and Jack Sheppard- across centuries through the edits Voth makes on a manuscript which purports to be Sheppard's own. How you feel about footnotes might determine how you feel about this novel; they can be distracting but in this case they are a really interesting literary tool. I was fascinated by P/Jack's childhood, career, and love story with Bess, who is a charmer. Rosenberg has illuminated a seldom visited corner of 18th century London. Voth is also interesting for his struggles with self. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. This deserves a wider readership.

First of all, major props to Jordy Rosenberg for writing a historial fiction story featuring transgender and marginalized. I am not part of the LGBT community, but this made me really happy to see. It’s definitely something we need more of. I really appreciated that aspect of this book.

As for the story itself, I have some mixed feelings. To be totally fair, I haven’t been in a great space lately, and reading anything has been a challenge. So, while I found the story interesting, I had a hard time getting into it. There was just a lot going on. And some things felt kind of overdone. The footnotes, for example. Now, I’m all for some good footnotes, and these were definitely entertaining, but there were just SO MANY of them. (And, since I had a digital ARC, it was hard to keep up with them. Not the fault of the book, just something that may have made them feel more inconvenient for me, personally.) I think this book might have benefited from the author being a bit more selective about the footnotes.

I also felt like this book suffered a bit from MFA syndrome. (In which the author must show off the brilliant skills they learned from their MFA.) Which isn’t surprising since the author is a professor. Kind of ironic since I have a master’s in English and creative writing, but I tend to find books written by MFAs to be a bit overwritten and pretentious. This one wasn’t particularly egregious, but I noticed it. And let’s just say it’s not my favorite thing.

Overall, though, this wasn’t a bad book. I think the story was solid, and the diversity in this book easily bumped it up a star for me.

Confessions of the Fox, by Jordy Rosenberg, is a very sneaky book. It begins as a discovered manuscript story when academic R. Voth comes across a handful of eighteenth century pages that purport to be the “confessions” of legendary thief and jail-breaker, Jack Sheppard. This is exciting enough, but then it quickly becomes an audacious and extremely erudite story about an intersex protagonist and transgender archivist, slavery, and capitalism. The book sucked me in with Jack’s story only to leave me thinking unsettling thoughts about how much we might (or might not) own our own bodies and livelihoods.

Jack Sheppard was a historical figure with short career as a thief. He is mostly known to us today because he escaped Newgate Prison four times—which was believed to be impossible—before being hanged at Tyburn at the age of 22. In the manuscript Voth discovers, Jack Sheppard has an even more intriguing secret: he is intersex. He prefers male pronouns and dress, but he constantly worries about being found out as well as being rejected by the women he is attracted to. Jack does find love with Bess, a sex worker (as Voth deliberate names her), and the two lead their nemesis, Jonathan Wild, a merry dance, for as long as they can.

Voth speaks to us through footnotes. In the beginning of the book, the notes define eighteenth century London slang and offer references to actual scholarly works. But then, they begin to comment on the strangeness of the text—and to fight with their employer, the Dean of Surveillance. The Dean, and his bosses (a nefarious company with too many holdings and very good lawyers), very much want the manuscript. Unlike Voth, who wants to share the text with the world, the Dean and PQuad have a prurient interest in Jack and Bess’ sex life and Jack’s anatomy. The Dean and PQuad don’t understand Jack. They see someone they can gawk at like the Lion-Man in Jack’s story. Their interest raises the stakes for Voth, who suddenly has a bigger mission than just transcribing the manuscript.

I loved the interplay between Voth and Jack’s stories. The parallels between the two lives get stronger as Confessions of the Fox continues, leading to a twist that I’m still thinking about. There is so much in this novel to unpack; this is one of the smartest books I’ve read in a long time. Readers with an academic background will be right at home with this metafictional marvel. Readers who don’t like footnotes, however, may have a hard time with this book. This is also one of the rare books I recommend people read in print.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 26 June 2018.

When I started reading Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, my first thought was “Why are there so many footnotes? Soooo many footnotes.” I haven’t seen so many footnotes since my college literature classes. There were at least five footnotes that just said “Pussy.”

It didn’t take long to realize that most of the footnotes were telling a story within the story.

Basically, the first story is in a newly found manuscript about Jack Sheppard, a famous thief and jailbreaker in London during the 18th century. Sheppard was a real person who was in love with a prostitute known as Edgewater Bess.

In the manuscript, Sheppard alludes to the fact that he is transgender. I’m pretty sure that he was intersex, born with male and female genitalia. His mother wanted him to be a female but Sheppard identified as being male.

After he escapes from his apprenticeship as a carpenter, Jack lives with Bess. Eventually, he has his breasts removed and his vagina sewn shut. I imagine he goes through a lot of the same feelings that anyone who goes through sex reassignment surgery. Hopefully, the surgical part of gender reassignment has improved.



The manuscript is being read and annotated by Dr. Voth, who is also transgender. He’s going through a lot of the same things that Jack is going through – trouble at work and trouble with intimacy. It’s interesting to see how much has changed and how much has stayed the same since Sheppard’s time.

I would give this book 4.5 stars out of 5. It’s not a quick read but it is very good. It’s also probably different than most of the books out in the world right now.







I received an ebook from NetGalley in exchange for doing a review. All opinions are my own obviously.

A down-and-out professor gets ahold of a manuscript that purports to be a history of 18th-century British master thief and gender-bender Jack Sheppard. It’s provocative not only in content, but in form, as well — almost David Foster Wallace-esque with long footnotes, references to Derrida, and scholarly jabs. Easily my favorite fiction of the year so far. This author is brilliant.

What is this? Well, a damn hard book to review, to start. On one level we have what is presented as the 'recently discovered autobiography' of Jack Sheppard, real-life petty thief and escapee from jail in early 1700s London. Sheppard lived fast and died young, then proceeded to become an enormously famous figure in English folklore, probably most recognizable today as the inspiration for "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" in The Threepenny Opera. But Confessions of the Fox is in fact a novel, and though it otherwise mostly stays close to the facts and dates (as we know them) of Jack's life, here Jack is a transman, his girlfriend Bess is the daughter of a South Asian man who was press-ganged by the East India Company before escaping into an independant communal society hidden away in the fens of East Anglia, and his best friend Aurie is a black gay man. Just to be clear, I am all for this presentation of a multiracial queer history.

A second level of story is presented through footnotes, much like House of Leaves (though infinitely less confusing than that book, since we only have two levels of story here rather than the four or five in House of Leaves). This narrator is Dr R. Voth, a professor of English literature who is editing Jack's "autobiography" for publication and who is a transman himself. Voth alternates between telling mundane stories of his life – his ex, his job troubles, his attempts to ask out a neighbor – and citing genuine academic sources to provide context for Jack's story. Voth is fictional but his sources are not, which makes for an unsettling mixture of truth and imagination; I think I would have assumed the academic footnotes were also fictional if I hadn't happened to recognize several early ones. I've read Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, among others, and seeing them mentioned by a fictional character was like water to the face, confusing my assumption of what was real and what wasn't.

As the story goes on, "P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals" in association with "Militia.edu" attempts to take control of Jack's autobiography and Voth's work on it, leading both levels of Confessions of the Fox to become critiques of the commodification of the body and its experiences, capitalism in general, the history of the discovery and modern patenting of synthetic testosterone, and how historical biographies enter (or, more often, don't enter) the archive.

Which leaves us in an odd place. If you didn't instantly recognize what I meant by The Archive in that previous line, if you're one of the vast majority of humans on Earth who haven't read Appadurai's "Commodities and the Politics of Value", then I'm not sure this book is interested in talking to you. Certainly if Rosenberg ever bothered to explain any of these concepts in an introductory way I missed it. On the other hand, if you, like me, are an overeducated liberal who can nod pretentiously at sentences like "A commodity is an entity without qualities", then I'm not sure Confessions of the Fox has anything new to say to you. It restates various queer, postcolonial, and Marxist theories without adding anything to them or combining them in interesting ways. Like, sure, we all agree with Foucault that prisons form the model for surveillance and discipline by the wider society, but so what? Do something with that idea, expand upon it, challenge it, or else there's no reason to read Rosenberg's book if you've already read Foucault's. So then who is Confessions of the Fox for? I have genuinely no idea.

The love story between Jack and Bess or the adventure of Jack's exploits should have been enough to carry their half of the story. I love me a good historical thriller of criminals and the whores they adore. But we didn't really get that here; we see Jack and Bess's first meeting and first night spent together, but then we jump ahead to them as an already established relationship without seeing how they grow together and build trust and affection. Similarly, we never see Jack learn to pick pockets or burglar houses; he's just an innocent apprentice and then suddenly a famously skilled thief. He meets Aurie once and then we're told they're brothers-in-arms without ever seeing their friendship. Etc. In addition to all this, it's hard to love characters who are more living examples of theories than they are three-dimensional people, particularly when they keep bursting into dialogue like this example:
Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?”
It's not even that I disagree with the concept of "security theater", but it's not good fiction to have your characters straight-up define it, and then POINTING OUT IN A FOOTNOTE THAT THE 1720-ISH DATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST TO DO SO IS EVEN WORSE, OH MY GOD, DON'T PRAISE YOUR OWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FOR THE MODERN LANGUAGE YOU GAVE THEM.

Ahhh, I don't know. I agree with all of Confessions of the Fox's politics, I want to support histories (fictional or not) with more accurate, multiracial, and queer portrayals of the past, and I've certainly read far, far worse books, but in the end I just didn't much enjoy this. The worst I can say is that it's unengaging; I found my attention constantly drifting whenever I tried to read, and even put it down for a few weeks before finally coming back to finish it. But no matter what its good intentions, that doesn't make for a book I'd recommend. In the end Confessions of the Fox has a fantastic concept, but unfortunately doesn't pull off the execution.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2383982191

Normally I attempt to avoid reading plot summaries and reviews too much to maintain some element of surprise, but this one I did check out and it sounded irresistible, something straight out of Sarah Waters’ realm of queer historical fiction. Then again that was probably setting the bar much too high. This book does have a lot of the same ingredients (queer characters, historical setting, specifically England early 1700s, small crimes, grand love story, adventures, etc.), but prepared by a very different chef in a very different way…and that, of course, makes all the difference. The author used a real figure of English folklore, a young rogue with criminal tendencies whom no jail was able to hold, but reimagined him as a transgender character. The novel tries to stay authentic to its setting, even employing some of Olde English and the atmosphere and scenery is appropriately grimy for the times. The characters are interesting and the love story is, well, lovely. So far so good…but then the author decided that a single narrative would be too simplistic? and decided to present the story as a research project and his fictionalized (possibly barely so, because it comes across very autobiographically, a transgender professor…but who knows) and that just really didn’t work for me. Essentially it took an engaging picaresque and drenched it in unnecessary footnotes, overwhelmingly personal asides (because it’s confessions, get it, so everyone confesses) and personal sociopolitical gender policy agenda, which, well intentioned as it certainly was, just about tanked the book. There is nothing wrong with talking about these things, in fact it is important to do so, but in the middle of the book (even a relevant book) it just doesn’t work, it completely takes you out of the story for one thing. Imagine watching a movie and someone pausing it every so often to talk to you about themselves in tangentially relevant situations. Yeah, it’s like that. And I can’t stand footnotes to begin with, I’ll tolerate them in nonfiction when I must, but in fiction it’s just a no no. If the author managed to separate his ego from his work, this would have been pretty good. In its present form I didn’t care for its structure, it didn’t work as a gimmick as some split narratives do or as an omniscient interjecting storyteller (most books don’t). Seems like a work of fiction if done well can easily deliver a message on its own without the extraneous assistance of personal parallels. I suppose I just didn’t like the way the book was used as a platform for a message (no matter how much I may agree with the message) instead of letting it be an imaginative historical adventure it might have been. And in footnotes, those freaking footnotes, such nuisance, so not cute or clever as they might have been conceived. It’s Book, Interrupted…with the author seemingly trying to steal the limelight from its characters. And I had such expectations from this one. Thanks Netgalley.

There is so much to say about this book, I'm not even sure where to begin.

In many ways, the book is groundbreaking and fascinating. I've truly never read anything like it. But did I ENJOY it? Man, that's hard to say.

I'll be honest, this book was challenging to read. For one, the structure is complicated. On one level you have the relationship of Bess and Jack (EASILY the best part of the book). Then there is our author and his parallel story about finding the story about Bess and Jack and interpreting it (nearly all told in the footnotes). Then there is a (possible nefarious?) corporation who tries to take over the author's project, which necessitates the narrator's boss ALSO getting inserted into the story and debating with the author in the footnotes as well (which was pretty amusing.)

Had the book been merely about Bess and Jack and Jack's experience in the world as a trans man, (plus all of those narrative layers) that might have been cool. But Jack and Bess's story goes all over the place and is complicated too. There are ghost plague ships, and a Lion-Man, and Jack's fantastical ability to hear objects, and some sort of mysterious elixir made out of pig urine. Added on top of that is a larger (conspiracy?) the narrator uncovers and discusses at length in the footnotes about how this story we're reading even came to be.

At times I almost felt like I maybe wasn't cool enough to be reading this book--like perhaps my brain wasn't quite big enough to truly get it. (I'm sure some other reviewers will simply say this was a weird book they didn't like.) I do know that, due to its originality, I will be able to remember this book long after I've finished it. And I applaud the author for taking so many risks (even if it resulted in me getting sometimes lost and confused).

In other words, I have no idea how to distill this sucker down into a star rating. I think the vast majority of easy readers who want straightforward plot and typical characters would hate this book. I think marginalized communities, and trans people in particular will find it revolutionary. Me? I guess I'm going to come down in the middle and go with 3 stars. Loved the moxie and the reach, but didn't always love the ride.

Thanks to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Being a voracious reader, I was curious: the debut novel of an author "..writing with the narrative mastery of Sarah Waters and the playful imagination of Nabokov..", and described to be "...an audacious storyteller of extraordinary talent". The genre: LGBTQIA.

Jack Sheppard, the story's protagonist, was the 18th century’s most notorious robber and thief. His spectacular escapes from various prisons made him the most glamorous rogue in London at that time. An autobiographical "Narrative", thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, quickly followed by several popular plays. Mr. Dafoe is course is the author of "Robinson Crusoe" and many other classics.

Enter "Confessions of the Fox".

Although it is well-documented that Sheppard had an equally notorious lover and female companion, a prostitute, Elizabeth Lyon, also known as Edgeworth Bess, the author writes a speculative approach to recorded history wherein he proffers the discovery of a long-lost manuscript within which Sheppard, "the Fox", confesses to be a transgender, thriving in queer sub-cultures in London.

The author "...sought to oppose the ahistorical tendency of much fiction to imagine early modern London as a uniformly white city..." and that the "... novel draws heavily on histories of mass incarceration, racialization.." And further, notes that "...just as this book was being completed, Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike won demands, and Chelsea Manning and Oscar Lopez Rivera got free".

The political agenda thus laid out, open-mindedness is a must for some readers to enjoy the well-crafted storytelling or to strive to even finish the book.

No doubt the book is hard to read, much less speed-read, with the proliferation of arcane terms and 18th century style of writing, many parts of which seem to be lifted from existing text, although the author gives ample credit to referenced works as well as provides an arduous if cumbersome glossary at the end of each chapter when such terms are used.

Still, I would rate it an interesting read, a bit of an endeavor but quite a treat, at least the one to try if one were to tiptoe and test the waters in such genre. Definitely not for everyone.

Review based on an ARC (advance reading copy) presented by NetGalley and Random House.