Book Club: Place Envy

Michael Lowenthal will join the LBI Book Club to discuss his book Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation.

Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. 

Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth.

Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.

(Description from www.michaellowenthal.com)

Our Guest and the Author

Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex With Strangers, and four novels: The Same Embrace; Avoidance; Charity Girl, which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007″ pick; and The Paternity Test, an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Guernica, True Story, and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and Best New American Voices 2005. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications. His memoir-in-essays, Place Envy, was published in 2026.

The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers’ conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Instituto Sacatar, Lowenthal has also been awarded Lynchburg College’s Thornton Residency and the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize. He has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. For more than twenty years he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.

Before publishing his own work, Lowenthal was an editor at University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such authors as Chris Bohjalian, W.D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and comparative religion.

A former board member of the literary human rights organization PEN New England, Lowenthal lives in Boston and Pittsburgh.

(Description: www.michaellowenthal.com)

Where to Get the Book

The book can be found or ordered at many bookstores and at libraries.  Here are some links:

https://www.amazon.com/Place-Envy-Essays-Orientation-Machete/dp/0814259669/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814259665.html