Sep 25

Sep 25 Yr Dead

About the book

Author: Sam Sax
Publisher: McSweeney's

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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Bookshop.org (print)

My Review

Another gorgeous, moving book that probably wouldn’t have made it to the top of my TBR without the help of the National Book Award! (Nor onto my shelves — and that would have been such a shame, because I can’t even begin to tell you how stunning the hardcover is.)

Beautiful and devastating and sometimes puzzling, Yr Dead is about a nonbinary bookseller named Ezra, who has set themself on fire in an act of protest in 2016. We flash backward and forward in vignettes, all the way from their childhood to the moments after the fire, almost as if their life is flashing before their eyes.

I’m trash for novels written by poets, so I was destined to love this book (and I did). But don’t just read it for the prose; read it for the commentary on climate anxiety and the political state of the US; read it for the perspective on gender and sexuality and abandonment and domestic abuse and Judaism, including subtle and very well-done anti-Zionism.

Hats off, Sam Sax.