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.

The Sex Offender: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Stadler, Matthew

United States

Harpercollins

The author of Landscape: Memory presents a provocative look at the nature of love in the study of a man found guilty of having a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy and the confusions and complexities of the cure for child molestation.

Perennial

The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee; His Researches

Landscape: Memory (Plume Contemporary Fiction)

Plume

Max and Duncan, two boys living in 1915 San Francisco, are fascinated by the earthquake of 1906 and the World's Fair, and spend most of their childhood looking for clues to an understanding of them

Landscape: Memory

Contemporary

Macmillan Pub. Co.

Allan Stein

After a sex scandal involving one of his students, an American high-school teacher flees to Paris, only to find himself falling in love with the skateboarding son of the French family who has taken him in

Grove Pr

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has 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: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

The Sex Offender

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

GROVE PRESS

Michael Upchurch called The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee "a work of great charm, playful paranoia, and exquisite obsession." It is now available from Grove Press in its definitive, revised edition with an introduction by Michael Cunningham. Adrift in a glittering city of high culture and constant crime, an earnest young historian named Nicholas Dee finds his life being taken over by a mysterious dwarf and the curiously gifted illiterate boy he is charged with teaching.

The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee

Core Sample: Portland Art Now

Gragg, Randy

Clear Cut Press

Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha is a new novel by Matthew Stadler, the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. In a provincial Mexican capital a well-known expat gringa is found dead on a remote hillside. Narco gangs are suspected, but the real killer might be closer to home.The novel is a &ldquo;cover&rdquo; of another book, John Le Carre&rsquo;s A Murder of Quality (in the pop music tradition of cover songs, which are new renditions of old standards). The author explains his precise method in a special afterword to this unusual book.

Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha

Publication Studio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stadler, Matthew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stadler, Matthew

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stadler, Matthew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Sex Offender: A Novel

The Sex Offender: A Novel

The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee; His Researches

Landscape: Memory (Plume Contemporary Fiction)

Landscape: Memory

Allan Stein

The Sex Offender

The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee

Core Sample: Portland Art Now

Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha