Book Talk: Place Envy

Michael Lowenthal will join the LBI to discuss his book Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation. He will be joined in conversation by Tom Beer, editor-in-chief of Kirkus Reviews.

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.

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.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief of Kirkus Reviews, which has been publishing book reviews since 1933. He was previously an editor at Newsday and Out magazine, and served as the president of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn.