In his first essay collection since Figure It Out, Wayne Koestenbaum—eccentric, erudite, and endlessly inquisitive— explores his visions of art, music, and literature with supercharged clarity.

In The Imitation Mustache: & Other Essays, Wayne Koestenbaum brings his “alarmingly focused attention to detail” (John Waters) to a quintessentially Koestenbaumian range of subjects: Susan Sontag’s film Duet for Cannibals and the poet Kevin Killian’s collected Amazon reviews, Alice Neel’s expressive portraits of queer people and Hervé Guibert’s photograph of a lover’s backside.

Perpetually writhing within these essays is an obsessive, impressionistic reckoning with Koestenbaum’s own personal questions and desires: a torn self-portrait with a striped T-shirt leads to a thrilling spiral over ballpoint pens, old phone numbers, and his mother; an analysis of Keats, Frost, and iambic pentameter opens a rabbit hole of lust and panic; a reflection on the act of flossing—“a retroactive prayer”—considers excavations of all kinds, corporeal and spiritual.

Featuring a handful of never-before-published autobiographical works alongside a range of pieces from The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere, The Imitation Mustache turns Koestenbaum’s rare power of understanding toward the totality of life. It is, as he describes the extracted food from his teeth, “an anthology, a cluster of marks, a reckoning with formerly unseen minutiae.”

Wayne Koestenbaum isa Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His many books span poetry, essay collections, biography, and fiction; he is also an accomplished playwright and the librettist for the opera adaptation of his book Jackie Under My Skin. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays and poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, and many other publications. A widely shown painter, he released his first album of piano and voice in 2017. He lives in New York.