Try our new book recommendation quiz to get recommendations tailored to your preferences.

Summary and Reviews of Yr Dead by Sam Sax

Yr Dead by Sam Sax

Yr Dead

by Sam Sax
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 6, 2024, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant.

Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that's decided on this final act of protest. 

Told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography, Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is the electric debut novel from award-winning writer Sam Sax, one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.

Excerpt
Yr Dead

I can't make heads or tails of it, the goat on the corner of Union and Metropolitan. Of course, I've seen stranger things, living in this city: the Chabad men dragging a straw effigy down Myrtle Avenue cursing each other in Yiddish, the woman selling infant-sized dolls made out of her own human hair, the apartment fire at the popular Chelsea orgy – flames licking up the side of the building like the cheap wig of some messy god. But this goat, mottled gray coat with a short white beard, is just standing on the corner chewing on some long grasses that appear to materialize in his mouth as he chews. It's 7 a.m. and commuters walk past without noticing. A group of boys run by on their way to school, trailing their baseball gloves behind them like giant leather hands. The elder waitress in ancient caked-on makeup smokes outside the terrible twenty-four-hour diner, looking deep into the distance, not about to be bothered by goats.

I pause only a moment; the twin slits of ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Presented as a series of fleeting, non-linear vignettes, the novel plays very literally with the notion that our whole life flashes before our eyes just before we die. Ezra's memories of pain and joy as a queer, Jewish youth flood over them, and accumulate for the reader into a moving exploration of suffering and desperation... While Ezra's personal pain is a large factor in their decision to end their life, external factors, like the climate emergency and international war, also play a role. Ezra clearly feels the weight of these social issues, and struggles to reconcile their passionate desire for change with the futility of their actions...continued

Full Review (851 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).

Media Reviews

EverOut
Sax's measured, lyrical voice, always paired with hints of humor and knife-like emotional resonance, feels perfectly pitched to the zeitgeist.

Frozen Sea
Yr Dead, captivates the reader with sharp, inventive writing that reads like intricately layered prose poetry, and also dazzles with the conceit of the book itself […] a novel that's about death just as much as it is about what remains after death: the moments shared with friends; the foundational memories of a family; one's own legacy; constructed myths; collective action; atomized data points containing the minutia of one's life; furniture and clothing that outlives its owner; notes in the margins of a book; the world we leave to others after we've passed through it.

Our Culture
Stylistically inventive and provocative, Sax expands on their poetry with a blazing novel.

The Observer
Yr Dead lays bare the deep loneliness of living in the digital age; how others shape us; and how, out of the ashes of catastrophe (and despite the world's ills), humanity shows through the cracks. There is hope.

The Telegraph (UK)
★★★★★. It's remarkable that Sax manages to do so much with so little. Yr Dead never feels laboured, and without being too expository, Sax allows you to find meaning in the smallest moments. […] Yr Dead is a novel that could so easily lean into the horror of its central act, but instead settles on something more delicate.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The novel is replete with vivid images, the strength of which is rare outside of poetry. Sax has produced a work that is meditative, deeply humane, and profoundly original. Less plot-driven than language-, emotion-, and image-driven—a poet's novel through and through—the result is a searingly beautiful and devastating foray into fiction. A poetic depiction of pain, queerness, Jewishness, and what it is to live.

Author Blurb Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
A rare, compulsively readable combination of thunderous lyricism and pitch-perfect humor. There is not a wasted sentence, or even word, in this brilliant queer gem of a book.

Author Blurb Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic
With Yr Dead, Sax revivifies the novel form, sculpting a poignant narrative that accumulates in meaning and sticks in the mind long after reading. There is rage in this work, and resistance against the pervasive horrors of our times, which Sax engages towards a delicate and astute exploration into the contradictions of a self and society. Refreshing as it is revelatory, Yr Dead demands attention to the need for change―I am grateful for it.

Author Blurb Safia Elhillo, author of Home is Not A Country
A perfect ghost story..it surprised me―startling me into a laugh, into knowledge, into a deep and enduring ache. I love this book.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Poets Turned Novelists

Yr Dead is author Sam Sax's debut novel, but not their first published work; they have previously published four chapbooks and three full collections of poetry, one of which won the James Laughlin Award and another of which won the National Poetry Series. Many other well-established poets have also turned to fiction with great success. A few of them are featured below.

Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Goregous by Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong is known for his emotionally charged work that explores sexuality, Vietnamese American identity, and human connection. His debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds was published in 2016 to much critical acclaim and a string of major awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award. He followed it up with the 2019 novel On Earth We're...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Yr Dead, try these:

  • There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven jacket

    There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven

    by Ruben Reyes

    Published 2024

    About this book

    An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.

  • Martyr! jacket

    Martyr!

    by Kaveh Akbar

    Published 2024

    About this book

    A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in ...

Read-Alikes are one of the many benefits of membership. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Model Home
    Model Home
    by Rivers Solomon
    Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Mighty Red
    The Mighty Red
    by Louise Erdrich
    Permit me to break the fourth wall. Like any good reviewer, I aim to analyze a book dispassionately,...
  • Book Jacket: The Palace of Eros
    The Palace of Eros
    by Caro De Robertis
    When male suitors intended for her older sisters spread a rumor that Psyche's beauty surpasses that ...
  • Book Jacket: Rejection
    Rejection
    by Tony Tulathimutte
    A young man identifying as a feminist tumbles down the incel rabbit hole after a lifetime of sexual ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

  • Book Jacket

    The Bog Wife
    by Kay Chronister

    Five West Virginia siblings unearth secrets after the rupture of a supernatural bargain tying their fate to their land.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..