Yr Dead

by Sam Sax, Rita Bullwinkel (Editor)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Coming-of-age in the blink of an eye, Yr Dead is a revelatory look into tragedy and life, courage and pain, from childhood to adolescence and self-immolation.

Winner of the 2025 IPPY Award for literary fiction. Longlisted for the National Book Award. Named a top debut novel of 2024 by Kirkus, and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist.

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. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is the electric debut novel from award-winning writer Sam Sax, one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952119996
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Pages:	281
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They're the author of PIG, Madness, and Bury It. Sam has received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and Yaddo, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University

Editorial Reviews

★ 2024-05-17
In the first work of fiction from a poet who illuminates the queer and Jewish experiences, life flashes before the eyes of a nonbinary person who’s lit themself on fire.

It’s not a spoiler to say that poet Sax’s debut novel centers on an act of self-immolation. The novel begins with short descriptions of three smaller encounters with fire, three different burns, labeled first through third degree: a painful childhood accident at the stove, adolescent smoking, a ritual gone horribly wrong. The final section, which comprises the bulk of the novel, is the final degree of burn: immolation. In vignettes that transmute experience in associative fits and starts, as one might cycle through visions at the end of one’s life, the narrator, Ezra, reflects on the world they inhabit as a queer Jewish person: a world that shifts mainly between Yiddishland and a gritty, sometimes ugly, but enchanting New York City. The fragments bounce back and forth in time, as Ezra inhabits the lives of their ancestors in the old country, the moment of their conception, their ambulance trip after their final act, and everywhere in between. Ezra’s musings span not just time and space but a range of topics—from Jewish ancestral legacies to technology and the internet to gender identity to parent-child relationships—and draw upon a deep well of references. The novel is replete with vivid images, the strength of which is rare outside of poetry. Sax has produced a work that is meditative, deeply humane, and profoundly original. Less plot-driven than language-, emotion-, and image-driven—a poet’s novel through and through—the result is a searingly beautiful and devastating foray into fiction.

A poetic depiction of pain, queerness, Jewishness, and what it is to live.

Kirkus Reviews

Sax has produced a work that is meditative, deeply humane, and profoundly original.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“★★★★★. It’s remarkable that Sax manages to do so much with so little. Yr Dead never feels laboured, and without being too expository, Sax allows you to find meaning in the smallest moments. […] Yr Dead is a novel that could so easily lean into the horror of its central act, but instead settles on something more delicate.”
—Sophie Dickinson, The Telegraph

“Yr Dead is a closing prayer—an argument for running into the light at full sprint.”
—Henry Hicks IV, The Brooklyn Rail

“Yr Dead lays bare the deep loneliness of living in the digital age; how others shape us; and how, out of the ashes of catastrophe (and despite the world’s ills), humanity shows through the cracks. There is hope.”
—Miriam Balanescu, The Observer

“Sax’s measured, lyrical voice, always paired with hints of humor and knife-like emotional resonance, feels perfectly pitched to the zeitgeist.”
—Lindsay Costello, EverOut

“Stylistically inventive and provocative, Sax expands on their poetry with a blazing novel.”
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“Yr Dead, captivates the reader with sharp, inventive writing that reads like intricately layered prose poetry, and also dazzles with the conceit of the book itself […] a novel that’s about death just as much as it is about what remains after death: the moments shared with friends; the foundational memories of a family; one’s own legacy; constructed myths; collective action; atomized data points containing the minutia of one’s life; furniture and clothing that outlives its owner; notes in the margins of a book; the world we leave to others after we’ve passed through it.”
—William Ward Butler, Frozen Sea

“Yr Dead is a propulsive read, wildfire writing leaving nothing behind.”
—Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

“A kaleidoscopic wonder here to help us see this broken world anew.”
—R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

“It’s not just that I trust Sam Sax’s imagination. My sincere belief is that Sam’s creative freedom unlocks the potential for our liberation.”
—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

“A singular, titrated, indelible debut.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

“A perfect ghost story..it surprised me—startling me into a laugh, into knowledge, into a deep and enduring ache. I love this book.”
—Safia Elhillo, author of Home is Not A Country

“A rare, compulsively readable combination of thunderous lyricism and pitch-perfect humor. There is not a wasted sentence, or even word, in this brilliant queer gem of a book.”
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

“With Yr Dead, Sax revivifies the novel form, sculpting a poignant narrative that accumulates in meaning and sticks in the mind long after reading. There is rage in this work, and resistance against the pervasive horrors of our times, which Sax engages towards a delicate and astute exploration into the contradictions of a self and society. Refreshing as it is revelatory, Yr Dead demands attention to the need for change—I am grateful for it.”
—Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic

“A young, queer person’s search for understanding in the face of tragedy leads to self-immolation, setting off the dazzling kaleidoscope of memories and prayers that compose this vital novel. Sax’s prose turns out to be just as dynamic and magnetic as their poetry, just as full of sincerity and poignancy, with an urgent prescience while tussling with timeless questions of belonging and meaning. After sobbing through the final, breathless pages of Yr Dead, you’ll wake up the next morning to see the world anew, vibrant, and undeniably alive.”
—Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop, Athens GA

From the Publisher