Wayne Koestenbaum’s collection of fables, THE CHEERFUL SCAPEGOAT, is featured on The New York Times Book Review’s New & Noteworthy. They write: “These charmingly insouciant short stories by the noted critic, poet and essayist exhibit the same surreal whimsy that distinguishes his work in other formats.” Meanwhile, Negar Azimi raves for Bookforum: “Koestenbaum’s imaginative magic extends to his sentences, sensuous and syntactically adventurous, rarely a means to an end but ends in themselves—bravura, permissive, frivolous. His lines make one’s own feel anorexic, dull by comparison.” Lastly, the collection received a glowing blurb from COSMOGONY author Lucy Ives, who praises it as “an elegant, rude book—beautiful and acerbically composed. Like scenes scripted by Edward Gorey and directed by Ryan Trecartin, Wayne Koestenbaum’s brief parables manage to be at once delicate and extreme, vile and flowery, coolly precise and gorgeously insane. I don’t know anyone else who writes like this.” Semiotext(e) published the book on March 23, 2021.