Antonio Cristoforo Baldini, aka Tonly Baldwin, is born in New York's Little Italy in 1928 to an immigrant family on the fringes of organized crime. Tony, good-looking and a talented singer, romanticizes the dangerous lives of his brothers. Upon their violent deaths he turns away from the past, landing the lead in a Broadway musical, and falling in love with its wealthy producer, Priscilla Poyncroft Porter. However, Tony's charmed life, and his marriage, soon begin to unravel, and he finds himself drawn to a mysterious, matchstick violin made by a prisoner, and to his memories of the seductive lives of his brothers. His past, and present, begin to catch up with him. Soon, with the help of a therapist Dr. Norma Mellows, he finds himself making a case to fight for his freedom and true identity.

Extending the story of the troubled life of Rosa, a character first developed by the author in "Longing," this novel describes her difficult relationship with her mother, Eleanor. Rosa's story unfolds as though in a parallel world: dogged by the same obsessions as her mother and resorting to sex and madness as elements of destruction. At the core of their tension is the illicit affair Eleanor has had with her daughter s husband, Antonio. Both Rosa and Eleanor find the defining focal point in the same man, whose gift for interpreting the longing of others means his own bitter destruction. Narrated in two voices from perspectives of both women, this novel describes both their lives in depth, covering a span of nearly 70 years during which the world around them undergoes enormous change."

A new edition of a “dazzlingly seductive” fever dream written in “brilliant poetic vernacular” ( Bookforum ) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner. For five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family’s home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random strangers, music students, his aunt, and occasionally his wife. As he prepares for a comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes, a walled medieval town in southern France, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the Italian circus star Moira Orfei must join him there to perform alongside him. Extravagantly (and tragicomically) describing his hallucinatory plans in a series of twenty-five notebooks, he assembles an incantatory meditation on performance, failure, fame, decay, and delusion. "If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this. --John Ashbery

"Tynset takes place during a sleepless night, but as the work unfolds it becomes apparent that the circumstances of the immediate present serve merely as points of departure. Plagued by incessant rumination, the narrator's restless mind spins thread after thread of thought, fantasy, and memory into an elaborate tapestry spanning centuries and covering thousands of miles--all without the narrator ever leaving his house. Hildesheimer famously refused to describe Tynset as a novel; instead, he chose to think of the work as an extended monologue whose structure derives from the musical rondo form, with the recurrence of the titular Norwegian town functioning as a refrain"--

"The Parting Gift is an epistolary novel, one long letter written by a nameless narrator to his host of the last four months, a recounting of the events that caused him to show up in this unnamed American city with an erotic story of obsession, jealousy and revenge that took place at the other side of the world, in a seaside farming community in Israel, with disastrous results"--

Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’s last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo’s wife, aside from servicing two of Theo’s twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen—taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students—contribute to Theo’s sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960’s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira’s guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.