Confessions of the Fox

By Jordy Rosenberg,

Book cover of Confessions of the Fox

Book description

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award, 2019

A New Yorker Book of the Year, 2018
A Huffington Post Book of the Year, 2018
A Buzzfeed Book of the Year, 2018

'Quite simply extraordinary... Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier and Daniel Defoe…

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Why read it?

6 authors picked Confessions of the Fox as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jordy Rosenberg does something clever and innovative with the historical fiction genre and reimagines the historical figure of Jack Sheppard as a transgender man. This is a bit of a two-for-one as there’s also the metatextual story, told through footnotes, of a contemporary trans academic who comes across the ‘confessions’ of Jack. It’s playful, knowing, and slippery. It made me think a lot about the nature of history and what we project onto the people of the past. It pairs beautifully with the Bad Gays podcast. 

I’ve never been to the marsh and fenlands of East England, but the descriptions…

From Rachel's list on queer historical fiction.

I have never read anything quite like this book. Rosenberg takes the story of the folk hero Jack Sheppard and re-imagines it as the tale of a trans man who first escapes indenture then becomes a hero to the people after a daring escape from prison. He falls in love with Bess Khan, who has fled tragedy in the fenlands to become a revolutionary in eighteenth-century London.

Rosenberg also ingeniously uses footnotes to create the unforgettable character of Professor Voth, who begins by investigating the rediscovered manuscript of Sheppard’s story and ends up telling his own story as well. 

I…

I read this book early in my exploration of genderqueer identity, and I found Professor Voth’s defiant joy in uncovering and sharing the historical story of Jack Sheppard, and in his own trans identity, permission-giving. This playful book dramatizes the search for trans histories and ancestries, ultimately transforming this search into a celebration of chosen family.

From Morgan's list on folks seeking genderqueer ancestry.

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A Theory of Expanded Love By Caitlin Hicks,

Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.

Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…

As a historian, I love well-researched historical fiction. Imagine my surprise when a lover handed me Confessions of the Fox. This book offers a historical reimagining of the life and times of 18th-century English thief Jack Sheppard, who, in Rosenberg’s estimation, was a transgender man. Confessions is also a commentary on queer historical practice. Periodic footnotes offer meta observations by a modern-day trans academic who has apparently “discovered” Sheppard’s lost text. This is a fun and stirring book on many levels—a revisionist work of “what if” history, a page-turning working-class queer love story, and an intervention in transgender historiography.

This book has several mind-benders in it, and I love it. There is a historical manuscript that an academic in the near-future has to verify for authenticity. The manuscript is from the 1700s about a transperson named Jack Sheppard, and his adventures in London. But the footnotes from the near-future academic and their advisors reveal a threat that ultimately cause them to flee. This novel bends and stretches and changes, all the while keeping one narrative in 1724 with the incredible slang of Jack Sheppard, and the other narrative and its meta-revelations stuck (almost always) in the footnotes. By then…

Jordy’s astonishing page-turner is so much more than the ‘zingy romp’ its cover blurb claims for it (though it is also pretty ‘zingy’). Where to start? A beleaguered academic finds a manuscript showing that eighteenth-century London super-thief Jack Sheppard was a trans man embroiled in an attempt to acquire an early preparation of testosterone. At once a bitter satire on the crushing of academic freedom by university management’s turn to corporate capitalism, an attack on the ruthless brutality of Big Pharma, a meditation on the problematics attending historical research, a clarion call for trans voices to be heard on their…

From Zoë's list on trans liberation.

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Bessie By Linda Kass,

In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…

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