{"product_id":"the-cheerful-scapegoat","title":"The Cheerful Scapegoat - Fables (Semiotext(e) \/ Native Agents)","description":"\u003cb\u003eWayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in \u003ci\u003eThe Cheerful Scapegoat\u003c\/i\u003e are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of \u003ci\u003eThe Cheerful Scapegoat\u003c\/i\u003e, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKoestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50957400604960,"sku":"9781635901443","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0836\/3661\/7504\/files\/9781635901443.jpg?v=1763755286","url":"https:\/\/creativebysanchez.com\/es\/products\/the-cheerful-scapegoat","provider":"Creative By Sanchez","version":"1.0","type":"link"}