Ambitious, weird, mind-stretching in the best ways, self-indulgently horny in a way I frankly delight in, very funny, very hopeful. ( )

2018. Jack Shepard, the real person on whom Mack-the-Knife was based, is a master thief and jailbreaker. He’s also trans in 18th century London. This novel attempts to somewhat decolonize its era, having more queers, and sex workers, and being distinctly anti police. At the same time it is a rollicking good tale. Top surgery is certainly gory, and testosterone perhaps somewhat far-fetched, but I liked it. ( )

If you ever wished someone would magically transform all those queer & critical theory books into one juicy sexy funny anti-capitalist/anti-colonialist/anti-racist, gender queer, muff diving novel, your wish has been granted.

Loved it, obv. ( )

This novel is doing A LOT, and it takes guts to attempt something this experimental. I'm happy I found this novel, even happier I read it, and mostly happy that there is an author just crazy and brave enough to write it.

I don't think I'm the author's idea audience - to me, it seems clear he is writing primarily for fellow trans folks, and the rest of us are just lucky to be listening it. It's part history, part social commentary, part collective catharsis, and I enjoyed the heck out of it even when I'm pretty sure I didn't always understand it.

This novel is not like anything else I've read in a long time, and I'm pretty sure I'm better for the reading. ( )

It's a common experience among transgender people, especially those of us who read a lot, to start to get frustrated with the knowledge that none of the books we read are really For us.
It's hard to explain because of course not every book you read has to be For You, and in fact it's necessary and preferable to read books that are not explicitly For You because that's how you begin to understand the experiences of people who are different than you-- but at the end of the day, it's very lonely to read stacks of books and know that a lot, if not most, of the authors are ignorant of or even morally opposed to your very existence.
It's even more difficult to explain that it's not always as simple as just going down a list and picking books with transgender characters, because most of those books aren't really For us either; they're for cisgender people who want an easily understood, easily digestible trans narrative to swallow so that they can feel like they've successfully absorbed a story that wasn't For them.
Even books by trans authors aren't always For us, despite being generally more respectful, usually because the author assumes that in order to appeal to cisgender readers they must dilute the trans experience into something that cisgender people can relate to (which is, of course, nigh impossible).
This book is possibly the first book I've read that I knew, without a single doubt, was For Me. This was written by a trans man, for trans people, without any dumbing-down, hand-holding, or explanations for cis people. I could go into the hows and whys, try and explain all the things this book made me feel, but I'm not sure I would do it justice. This book is unlike anything else. ( )

I relished the blend of this text's frame and primary narratives, enjoying both with equal engagement. Funny, exciting, romantic, this novel is a work of brilliance, adding a great twist on the traditional ninteenth-century based city text.

A fascinating, makes-you-think read from the "found manuscript" genre (with all the various pitfalls that this sort of book usually presents). Rosenberg has managed to write it so that the shortcomings of the form are nearly all addressed by the meta-narrative, though I still had a few questions about what the manuscript was supposed to have looked like. Anyway, a weird (in the best way!) debut from an author to keep an eye on for sure. ( )

There were two main problems for me with this book. First, the writing style. I get that it is set in the London of the 1700s. Even still, the constant referring to the explanatory notes got tiresome. The second, and bigger, problem was the footnotes. The narrator of the story has his own story in these footnotes, so essentially one is reading two stories at the same time. I did not care for this format, especially since the footnotes got progressively longer, sometimes taking up 2/3 of the page itself. Around page 70, I put the book down never to pick it up again.

The scope of the story is ambitious and the premise interesting, and I won’t go into those here because other reviewers have done so already much more succinctly and eloquently than I could have. I want to emphasize that many readers will be intrigued by the multiple political agendas the story seems to cover, and find the narrative tone fresh and compelling. For me, it failed on both counts. Also off-putting were the numerous (hundreds?) of references to private parts, colorful and arcane though those terms were. Such crudity feels gratuitous and is a guarantee for me to roll my eyes.

If the author had chosen to stick to sensible language and not have the footnotes altogether I’m sure my interest would have been held. Alas, it would have been a different book, and a different author, and so this wish is pointless. ( )

I was excited to get my hands on this book, since it rings two of my favorite fun-reading bells, 18th century fiction of the bawdy, funny Fielding/Sterne variety, and gender creativity. Happy to say I wasn't disappointed - and I got the added bonus of the corollary story of the 'editor's' life, told in footnotes - a technique I loved in [b:Pale Fire|7805|Pale Fire|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388155863s/7805.jpg|1222661], although this editor doesn't go nearly as far off the rails as Kinbote. There's all kinds of nods to post-colonial and queer thought both in the plot of the Confessions and in the editor's commentary, but you can immerse yourself in them as deeply or (like me) as shallowly you want - either way they give depth and meaning to both story lines without killing the plot, the pacing or the fun. I did get a bit lost in the 'Archives/Stretches', but I wasn't bothered by it - that's what archives are for anyway. ( )

The main character is Macheath from The Beggars Opera and the song Mac the Knife, This is not exactly the Macheath people are used to. The book is written by a transsexual (F-M) man about an intersex man who identifies as male researching a manuscript about an 18th century intersex man who identifies as male. That last person is Macheath otherwise known as Jack Sheppard. There’s more erotica than I’m comfortable with, but there are also lots of interesting historical facts particularly about economics and the beginning of the London police force ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2019/01/201901-confessions-of-fox-jordy.html ( )

So many of the classics are being rewritten and I have sampled more than a few. Some have been more successful than others. So when I saw Confessions of the Fox had some resemblance to Threepenny Opera and I am more than familiar with the piece I thought sure, why not. This was so not for me on every level. I plodded through over one hundred pages and decided to wave the white flag.

I obviously missed the import, rollicking fun and bawdy times. What I didn’t miss was every reference, archaic or otherwise to human genitalia- just a bit much and footnoted as well. Maybe I will give this another chance at some future date but for now I am done.

I received an ARC from NetGalley and Random House for which I thank them. ( )

This is a wonderfully out-there debut novel—ambitious as hell, smart, and fun. At its surface level the book is a twinned narrative involving a discovered manuscript and a contemporary academic who annotates it heavily (and personally) as he transcribes it. But there's a whole lot more going on, particularly in the manuscript, which is ostensibly a biography of the early 18th-century English folk hero Jack Sheppard—who was the model for Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and later Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera—and his prostitute/moll Edgworth Bess. But aside from being a rollicking retelling, it's also a queering of the legend: in Jordy Rosenberg's retelling Sheppard is a trans man (as is his modern-day professor Voth), Bess is Southeast Asian, and one of the main characters is a gay black man. But beyond even that set of identity politics, which would be innovative and entertainingly loaded on its own (Rosenberg is a trans man as well), there is a lot of really interesting subtext—on colonialism, big pharma, academia, archival authority, racial and gender identity and rights, industrialism, commodification, medical ethics, slavery, and I'm sure I'm missing something else. You get the idea, though.

For the most part Rosenberg pulls off this hyper-intersectionality, and mainly he keeps the energy rolling along. Voth's personal footnoted drama can wears a little thin at parts, although I'm sure it was written to, and there is some overly neat—and slightly wtf-inducing—consummation of Voth's intellectual odyssey toward the very end. But this is a fun, thoughtful, prickly read. Rosenberg absolutely goes big here, and it's worth your time if you're up for it. (This is not, obviously, a beach read, unless this sounds like your idea of a beach read—it is mine, or would be if I ever got within ten miles of a beach—in which case, have at it.) ( )

There are a lot of layers going on in this book, so many that I suspect I’m not educated enough to even notice. It’s a story within a story; it’s a wild adventure story and also a statement about how people of color, the queer and the trans people have been erased from history. It also mentions colonialism, privacy issues, Marxism, women’s rights, and I’m sure lots of other things that I missed.

The first narrative is that of Dr. R. Voth, a transman in academia who comes across an old manuscript at the university library’s used book sale. When he reads it, he discovers it’s the biography of Jack Sheppard, who was a real historical person who attained legendary status. The date on the manuscript is 1724, and as Voth reads and transcribes it, he puts numerous footnotes in it. Some are just to let us know what the antique slang means, but as the story goes on, the footnotes take on a more autobiographical status and tells us Voth’s own story, which is even more convoluted and much more depressing. They also become very political in nature.

Jack’s story starts with him as P, a young girl sold into slavery to a furniture maker. Shackled to their bed at night, Jack learns to pick locks with ease, and by his teens is using his nights to explore London. Wearing male clothing and tightly binding his breasts, he escapes his owner and lands in the room- and the arms- of Bess Khan, an Asian sex worker. His adventures include running from both the police and the local crime boss, avoiding the plague, and a truly horrifying gender confirmation surgery. Despite the odds against them, Jack and Bess determine to be together. Despite all the other reviewers calling Jack ‘trans’, I swear he is intersex, identifying as male. This group of people seem even less understood than trans people.

There are so many characters that at times I couldn’t keep track of who was who- this wasn’t helped by having the two narratives weaving in and out of each other. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, a great deal. But a lot of the political references seemed grafted crudely on, rather than being a smooth part of the story, and that made them rather jolting- and not in the mind-opening, good way. It felt at times like I was reading an early draft, rather than a polished product. Because of that, I can only give it four stars. ( )

Back when I was in grade school, the historical figures we studied largely consisted of straight, white, mostly Christian, mostly Western [cis] men. I don’t know how much has changed since then, but I know in my day there was a lot of stories that were omitted or, more egregiously, interpreted in such a way as to maintain the status quo and paint history's “victors” as the good guys.

Jordy Rosenberg’s ambitious Confessions of the Fox begins with a foreward penned by a professor on the lam from the New England university where he formerly taught, after he stumbles upon [and absconds with] a potentially valuable discovery. It seems he has in his possession an unbound manuscript chronicling the life story of Jack Sheppard, the 18th Century criminal on whose life Brecht’s “The Three Penny Opera” is based.

What makes the manuscript particularly explosive is that the infamous thief and jail breaker had a compelling secret – he was born female. Sheppard’s story starts when he is a child sold into indentured servitude by his mother, through his escape into the mean streets of London, his romance with the prostitute known as Edgeworth Bess and his subsequent exploits as a thief who gains notoriety amongst the oppressed working class by breaking out of Newgate Prison multiple times. All this while figuring out how to live authentically as a male. No small feat in the 1720’s.

With the exception of the forward and epilogue, Confessions of the Fox is basically the manuscript in its entirety, heavily foot-noted by the professor, who feels a particular connection to the story - being a trans-man himself.

Initially, I wasn’t too enamored of this one. While I enjoyed the exploits of Sheppard, Bess and their criminal associates, I wasn’t particularly interested in the professor’s footnotes, which are chock-a-block with personal information that didn’t strike me as germane to either storyline. Plus, I found the author’s zeal to re-frame all of modern society’s ills in an 18th Century setting to feel distractingly anachronistic. Even if I agree with a writer’s politics (as in this case), an overly proselytizing tone tends to keep me from enjoying the story. Rosenberg manages to address police brutality, racial/ethnic prejudice (Bess is Indian and another underworld colleague is both black and homosexual), immigration, animal cruelty, women’s rights, environmental destruction, prison conditions, corrupt politicians, LGBTQ rights, sexual confirmation surgery and hormone therapy. At one point, the manuscript makes reference to a fabled utopian collective aboard a docked ship run by a group of “retired” female pirates and their liberated captives that is eerily similar to a scenario in Annmarie Monahan’s criminally underappreciated feminist novel, Three. Rosenberg even manages to somewhat awkwardly shoe-horn in issues of privacy rights and the evils of the massive pharma companies via the professor’s footnotes. Every reference jolted me out of the story and I was disappointed by the lack of subtlety in the presentation of this material until nearly the end of the book, when it all made perfect sense.

Ultimately Confessions of the Fox, both the novel and the fictional manuscript, is about re-visiting that history of straight, white, Christian and Western [cis] men and pushing them aside to make room for the rest of us. It’s about writing oneself back into history. Reclaiming it for those who have been minimized, vilified, marginalized or simply systematically written out. Despite my initial reservations, this proved to be a fascinating and rewarding read.

Highly Recommended. ( )

What a strange book.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I requested it from Net Galley, though the premise sounded intriguing; a retelling of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (the original source for Brecht's Threepenny Opera) with some gender-swapping? Okay I'm game.

The book recounts the short, intense life of one Jack Sheppard, a notorious 18th century footpad, and his love, Edgeworth Bess. But in this version, Jack is a young woman who has always identified as male, Bess is an Anglo-Indian sex worker, and they exist in a community of marginalized people who are given so few options in society that their only recourse is sex work or theft. There are subcultures within subcultures, queer and otherwise.

The story is told in the Found Manuscript format with footnotes from the professor who is annotating it, first for himself, and later for a company that's essentially coercing him into using it to sell their product. Dr. Voth is himself a transgender man, so the project is close to his heart, and he resents them wanting to use it commercially when he believes it should belong to the queer community. Throughout the course of the book, his annotations become more and more personal, and less about the manuscript itself, and it's within these increasingly impassioned annotations that the real theme of the story presents itself.

In the end the book is a heady mix of Hogarthian grotesqueness and Brechtian political satire, an often difficult book to like, and even to assimilate. It is sometimes pedantic, often heavy-handed, and the message sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. It can be amusing, it can be off-putting, but it does contain some important truths about what it is to be different in a society that values sameness.

Bottom line: Not for everyone, and not for people who don't care to think about the deeper questions of what they're reading. ( )

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jordy-rosenberg/confessions-of-the-fo....

Confessions of the Fox is a manuscript, discovered and annotated by a professor, Dr. Voth. Much of Voth's own story appears in the (copious) footnotes, while the text of the manuscript itself contains the story of legendary Jack Sheppard and his lover, Bess, who lived in London; the ms is dated 1724. This London is a prison for the poor, and conditions have just gotten worse, as (alleged) plague ships arrive in the harbor and constables are on every corner. The most minor offenses lead to capital punishments, but Jack - a trans man, the manuscript reveals - is adept at weaseling out of tight spaces, and Bess is brilliant and brave. Dr. Voth realizes, well into the manuscript, that it can't be merely one person's Confessions; there are multiple points of view and many people's stories.

See also: Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Quotes

That is to say, the hurt felt far away, or split Bess momentarily somehow from herself. Like she was reading a minor item in a distant rural broadside about someone who got hurt. (30)

Why are city folk possess'd of the insupportable and yet unshakeable belief that their knowledge extends far beyond the bounds of their experience? (Bess, 46)

He wanted to be known by her more than he needed to hide from her. (Jack, 162)

Her certainty about my wrongness was married with a certainty about my potential to do better. She had some kind of grasp of the future - a ferocity to make it do what she wanted. (Voth, 225)

"You know you can't use your misery as a talisman against worse misery, right?" (Voth's ex, 244)

All history should be the history of how we exceeded our own limits. (267)

An unlocked door is difficult not to walk through. (279) ( )