Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation

by Michael Lowenthal

Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.

Genres: Jewish

292 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 9, 2026

About the author

Michael Lowenthal is the author of the novels Charity Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Avoidance (Graywolf Press, 2002) and The Same Embrace (Dutton, 1998). His short stories have appeared in Tin House, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and Esquire.com, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (HarperCollins), Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader (Bloomsbury), and Best New American Voices 2005 (Harcourt). Three of his stories have received "Special Mention" in Pushcart Prize anthologies. He has also written nonfiction for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications.

The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers' conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, Lowenthal is also the winner of the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize. He teaches creative writing in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Lowenthal worked as an editor for University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such authors as Chris Bohjalian, W.D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert. He studied English and comparative religion at Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1990 as class valedictorian.

Lowenthal lives in Boston, where he is an active former board member of the literary human rights organization PEN New England.

Reviews

[Christopher Castellani · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are terrific essays: moving, unflinchingly candid, wide-ranging, yet, as a collection, satisfyingly cohesive; when I finished the second half of the first essay, which is tucked like a surprise gift at the end of the collection, I felt all the themes Lowenthal explores come thrillingly together. I especially enjoyed the author's self-interrogations, his poignant search for self, and his moral wrestling matches, as well as his humor and bawdiness and longing and insights into gay life in particular. Of course, in a book ostensibly about "place," I loved how vividly he brought to life places as disparate as Amish country, Brazil, Dartmouth College in the late 80s, Taiwan, and a blind gay cruise to Puerto Vallarta. This book would make a nice companion to Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing (ed. Alden Jones, 2025).

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful writing in essays that explore the gay amd queer experience.