The Imitation Mustache

In his first essay collection since Figure It Out, Wayne Koestenbaum—eccentric, erudite, and endlessly inquisitive— explores his visions of art, music, and literature with supercharged clarity.

In The Imitation Mustache: & Other Essays, Wayne Koestenbaum brings his “alarmingly focused attention to detail” (John Waters) to a quintessentially Koestenbaumian range of subjects: Susan Sontag’s film Duet for Cannibals and the poet Kevin Killian’s collected Amazon reviews, Alice Neel’s expressive portraits of queer people and Hervé Guibert’s photograph of a lover’s backside.

Perpetually writhing within these essays is an obsessive, impressionistic reckoning with Koestenbaum’s own personal questions and desires: a torn self-portrait with a striped T-shirt leads to a thrilling spiral over ballpoint pens, old phone numbers, and his mother; an analysis of Keats, Frost, and iambic pentameter opens a rabbit hole of lust and panic; a reflection on the act of flossing—“a retroactive prayer”—considers excavations of all kinds, corporeal and spiritual.

Featuring a handful of never-before-published autobiographical works alongside a range of pieces from The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere, The Imitation Mustache turns Koestenbaum’s rare power of understanding toward the totality of life. It is, as he describes the extracted food from his teeth, “an anthology, a cluster of marks, a reckoning with formerly unseen minutiae.”