Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation

By Michael Lowenthal

A queer, Jewish writer searches for belonging across countries, identities, and histories in a moving collection of essays about orientation and home.

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 world: 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 relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814259669
• ISBN13: 9780814259665
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"