Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

NIGHT NIGHT FAWN

Jordy Rosenberg

A novel

From the author of CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed begins to look back at all her failures - including her child.

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenber - gold world yenta, committed homophobe, accomplished jazzercizer - is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. Forget about her late husband, her career as the receptionist for an Upper East Side plastic surgeon, and her failed aspirations to be an actress. What she really wants to talk about are her unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Jewish diaspora, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara's theories get wilder, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates once again.

Part novel, part someone's mother's unauthorized memoir, this novel is a timely exploration of sexuality, intergenerational conflict, and who gets to have an intellectual life.

Jordy Rosenberg is the author of the novel CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX. Jordy's work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Lannan Foundation, The Banff Centre, The Ahmanson-Getty Foundation, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. He is a professor in the Department of English and Associated MFA Faculty in the Program for Poets and Writers at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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Book Published 2026-03-03 by One World

Comments

A bravura performance. Rosenberg breaks open a library of silences here.

Jordy Rosenberg's exuberant, exasperating narrator unleashes the full, hilarious, and ultimately revealing power of the rant. Night Night Fawn is a hugely enjoyable novel, devious and rich in irony.

Told from Barbara's opioid fogged delirium, the novel is her honest id speaking straight to the camera. She unspools the betrayal of an old friend; her marriage to Stephen Rosenberg, a masculine specimen with an unsexy job at the health department; and her growing detestation of their daughter, Jordana, whose choices infuriated Barbara early on. Barbara's-stream of-consciousness is cruel to the point of humor, which is the engine that powers the novel. Dying, high, and saying funny things, Barbara relaxes readers, allowing us to examine her domestic brutality with clear eyes. While Barbara's cruelty is culturally born of Zionism and Manhattan elitism, readers familiar with any intergenerational family friction will find catharsis here. And that's the gift of Rosenberg: funny, readable prose inviting everyone into the thrill of relatable satire.

Through the guise of fiction, Jordy Rosenberg invites us into an epic, audacious investigation of his mother and thus of gender, familial homophobia and transphobia, Jewishness and Zionism, and memory and self-delusion, across the millennium and all at an angle. I love this brilliant and hilarious novel.

Night Night Fawn is one of the most astounding novels of our time, a triumph of voice and social critique, a generational reckoning that is as urgent and gripping as it is playful and wickedly funny. Trust again the singular brilliance and heart of Jordy Rosenberg.

A singularly hysterical and ferocious novel, a book that has you in stitches while re-suturing youinviting you to feel how history both moves through and acts upon a body. an urgent intervention into contemporary Jewish letters and the ways in which settler colonialism and gendered violence reproduce inside our families. I was absolutely floored by this book and am just now peeling myself up off the ground.

Incendiary. Rosenberg crafts his satirical portrayal of Barbara's transphobia with a dizzying blend of broad humor and vitriol. her voice is consistently arresting, and a shocking final twist will cause readers to reexamine everything that came before. It's a memorable familial reckoning.

A novel as wickedly funny as it is smart. I have simply never read anything like it - exactly the queer, marxist, yenta-narrated tour de force that we need right now, an instant classic.

I love the voice of this novel so much. The unleashed id of Portnoy's Complaint alloyed with transmasculine prodigal sons, smutty yentas, and Cold War politics. This novel says the things readers need to hear; things they're afraid to say. Jordy Rosenberg writes with such verve it's like watching a fantastic skateboarder do a bunch of tricks; I'm hooked.

Jordy Rosenberg might be one of our most fearless living novelists. There are no half-measures in his work, just big ideas and living characters and gorgeous sentences and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise. Night Night Fawn is extraordinary.