I’ve been reading… CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX…

I picked up CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX by Jordy Rosenberg because I saw it on a best of trans literature list and was intrigued: Maggie Nelson’s truly remarkable THE ARGONAUTS aside, I haven’t read nearly enough. It’s really fun and smart, there’s a panache and flair to Rosenberg’s telling of the story of Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess, notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers in eighteenth-century London. I’m a little less enamoured by the narrative frame: in extensive footnotes, the academic who discovered the manuscript we have been reading, provides insights into the historical narrative as well as his own life. I feel like I’ve seen this literary trick a little too often, and feel it would have been enough to read a historical, genre-defying, bodice-ripping trans- caper without the constant meta-textual interruptions.