An edition of The sex offender (1994)

The sex offender

a novel

1st ed.
  • 4 Want to read

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list

Check-In

×Close
Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
Today

  • 4 Want to read

Buy this book

Last edited by MARC Bot
July 14, 2024 | History
An edition of The sex offender (1994)

The sex offender

a novel

1st ed.
  • 4 Want to read

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a man - a lapsed teacher who is guilty of having had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion. In the name of love, the police and the doctors will molest him, inside and out.

Subjected to a battery of strange therapies (many of them actual practices in health institutions across America), the man struggles to understand and embrace the lessons being offered to him by the Criminal and Health Ministry in charge of his new life. Under orders of the Doctor-General Nicholas, he is to find a new career away from the schools. He will become a writer: an occupation deemed therapeutic by the ministry's professional staff.

As the city descends into winter, the man finds his life falling into a regular routine: psychoanalytic sessions with his doctor; aversive therapies in the laboratories of the technicians; long afternoons spent idling at the Cafe Eichelberger; and each evening, a secretive sojourn to an underground club, the Burlesque, to watch the forbidden entertainments of a towering drag queen banned from the city's official stage.

The city is under siege, threatened by insurgent rebels encamped in the hills. The drag queen, suspected of ties to the rebels, has been forced underground. The sex offender's life becomes increasingly duplicitous. By day, he is ensnared in the posturing and costumes of the city's official culture and politics. By night, he revels in the theatrical excesses of the banned drag queen. He is pushed to the brink as the Doctor-General's therapies become increasingly violent and bizarre.

Torn between his allegiance to the Doctor-General and evidence that the drag queen is indeed linked to the rebels, the man finds himself straddling the breach between official politics and subversion.

The Sex Offender is at once a burlesque of the State and an unmasking of the foundations on which our notions of love and psychological health are based. In lavish prose reminiscent of the drag theater of Ethyl Eichelberger or Charles Ludlum, this chronicle weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

Publish Date
Publisher
HarperCollins
Language
English
Pages
206

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: The sex offender
The sex offender: a novel
2000, Grove Press, Distributed by Publishers Group West
in English
Cover of: The Sex Offender
The Sex Offender: A Novel
September 1995, Perennial
Paperback in English
Cover of: The Sex Offender
The Sex Offender: A Novel
September 1995, Perennial
in English
Cover of: The sex offender
The sex offender: a novel
1994, HarperCollins
in English - 1st ed.

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
New York, NY

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
813/.54
Library of Congress
PS3569.T149 S48 1994, PS3569.T149S48 1994

The Physical Object

Pagination
206 p. ;
Number of pages
206

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL1083651M
Internet Archive
sexoffendernovel00stad
ISBN 10
0060171073
LCCN
94007341
OCLC/WorldCat
30031193
Library Thing
500501
Goodreads
1136239

Community Reviews (0)

Feedback?
No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

This work does not appear on any lists.

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
July 14, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
December 4, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
October 29, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
February 28, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from Scriblio MARC record