Sam Sax and YR DEAD

"I think their experience in the bookstore is trying to think literary inheritance and spiritual and intellectual experience."

Sam sax is here to discuss YR DEAD, their debut novel about Ezra, a queer, non-binary 27-year-old of Jewish heritage, whose life we see in fragments and flashbacks when they self-immolate outside trump tower.

We talk about qualities of wandering, the multiplicities of Jewish identities, and what second hand bookstores can tell us about legacies and life.

Sam's PIG was named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets

YR DEAD is published by McSweeney's in the US and Daunt Books in the UK

Reference Points 

01.30 - who is Ezra

02.20 - is Ezra a flaneur?

04.53 - why the novel is set on this day

06.28 - the multiplicity of Jewish identity

09.40 - how death or organises or doesn’t organise the novel

15:00 different desires

19:20 - Ezra’s mother and her absence

24.25 - second hand bookshops and legacies

29.00 - the hopeful message of Sam’s novel

Reference Points

Hervé Guibert
Andrea Lawlor
Virginia Woolf