A vivid (and startling) example of the "new musicology", Beethoven's Kiss is an interdisciplinary study of romantic pianism in relation to gender and sexuality, ultimately underscoring the extent to which the piano resonates with intimations of both homosexuality and mortality. The first chapter, on the amateur pianist, scrutinizes the way Andre Gide and Roland Barthes discuss piano playing, their favorite composers - and their homosexuality. Situating these discussions within the histories of sexuality and amateur pianism, the author argues that connections between musical and sexual mastery are shaped by the "performance" of class and gender. The second chapter examines the homoerotic basis of the creation of nineteenth-century piano music and the equally homoerotic basis of the twentieth-century recreation of this music. The title of the third chapter, "Beethoven's Kiss", refers to the apocryphal story that Beethoven kissed Liszt, then eleven, in public. The author recounts other quasi-sexual myths about nineteenth-century child prodigies, examining how and why these stories used to circulate and why they no longer do so. The next chapter examines the different ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences sexualize famous pianists and polarize them along gender and sexual lines. The fifth chapter describes the gender, sexual, and class positioning of the "maiden" piano teacher in a variety of texts - interviews, memoirs, short stories, novels, and films. The book concludes with a far-ranging analysis of Liberace, who (with his silver candelabra) tried to perform upper-class status, who (with his devotion to Chopin) tried to perform highbrow taste, and who (with his closetedlifestyle) tried to perform heterosexuality.

"At once invitingly stylish and excitingly lucid, Love's Litany disentangles a rich, distinct tradition of philosophizing homoerotic love that looks back to Romanticism and urges forward toward modernism--toward the passionate merging, crystallization, camaraderie, experimentation, and mortal loss that mark our own fin de siecle."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University
"Everywhere tenderly epigrammatic, Kevin Kopelson's voice--moving with a litigator's clean, panoptic brio--demonstrates that critique can be a form of courtship, even a form of love."--Wayne Koestenbaum, Yale University

"The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky" is three books in one: an impressionistic account of the dancer's homoerotic career, an analysis of his gay male reception, and an exploration of the limitations of that analysis. The impressionistic account, based on the aestheticism of Walter Pater, focuses on significant gestures made by Nijinsky in key roles, including the Golden Slave, the Specter of the Rose, Narcissus, Petrouchka, and the Faun. The analysis of his reception, based on the semiotics of Roland Barthes, is deconstructive. And the exploration of the the analytical limitations sets the stage for cultural studies that move beyond Barthesian semiotics--beyond, that is, the author's last two books.
Why, given that most of his followers were not gay, describe Nijinsky's queer afterlife? The author's answer is that Nijinsky was the Lord Alfred Douglas of the Ballet Russes. The dancer, however, had even more "lilac-hued notoriety" than Douglas--notoriety based upon common knowledge of his sexual relationship with Serge Diaghilev, upon his having been one of the first sensuous young men to dominate a Western stage recently riven by the homosexual/heterosexual division we are still contending with today, and upon his mastery of leading roles and body languages that had very little to do with conventional masculinity.

The first extensive analysis of the relation of erotic philosophy to homosexuality in the modern period, this book focuses on homoerotic (mis)appropriations and subversions of homoerotic conceptions of romantic love in texts by eight authors: Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Ronald Firbank, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault, and Roland Barthes. In doing so, the author both positions these authors as experimental and influential erotic theorists and protests the critical undervaluation of love (as opposed to desire) in the construction of sexuality as we know it.

In Neatness Counts, Kevin Kopelson reflects on the poetics of the desk--rolltop or bureau-plat, cluttered or bare, the nestlike desk, the schematic desk, the dramatic desk, the dramatic lack of any such furniture. Exploring the topography of literary creation by way of the topography of work space, Kopelson, one of today's most important critics, offers a series of meditations on how orderliness, chaos, and other physical states correspond with both the exhilaration of production and the desperation of writer's block. Focusing on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the novelist Marcel Proust, the critic Roland Barthes, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Neatness Counts is at once critical and creative, examining how various writers' work habits relate to their published work. Kopelson also considers desks of his own--one that had belonged to an older brother, one he borrowed from a messy friend, one now shared with a partner. And by pursuing these two lines of inquiry to their unlikely but enlightening conclusions, Kopelson both fabricates a virtual library of literary insight and commemorates an era in which the term "desktop" didn't denote one's computer screen. Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His books include, most recently, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.

“When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris’s every sentence, it’s easy to miss the more serious side of what he’s up to.  Fortunately, Kevin Kopelson has come along to guide readers through the work of the best and most subversive social satirist in America.�  —Stephen McCauley, author of The Object of My Affection  "Charting a course from Marcel Proust to Tony Danza, Kevin artfully captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of reading David Sedaris. A witty, thoughtful, intimate encounter." —David Hyde Pierce "If I were to read a book on David Sedaris it might be this one." —Paul Reubens David Sedaris is nothing less than a literary phenomenon. His readings and live performances sell out within hours, while his books—Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim—have each been best-sellers. Sedaris became an almost overnight sensation in 1992 when he recounted his surreal experiences working as a Macy’s department store elf named Crumpet on NPR’s Morning Edition. The sardonic wit displayed in his “SantaLand Diaries� has since made him America’s preeminent satirist—brutally honest, often painfully sad, and above all, truly hilarious.   In Sedaris, Kevin Kopelson engages with the most difficult, uncomfortable, and often most humorous aspects of Sedaris’s writing—shame and public humiliation, dysfunctional families and destructive relationships, misanthropy and self-loathing—to reveal what makes Sedaris such an effective and affecting satirist, and to show why so many readers and listeners identify with him. For Kopelson, the key to understanding Sedaris lies in recognizing the importance of relationships to his comedy. Drawing extensively on both his nonfiction essays and short stories, Kopelson maps out Sedaris’s relationships in more or less chronological order—grandparents, parents, siblings, teachers, friends, coworkers, strangers, children, and lovers—and identifies the misunderstandings, betrayals, and cruelties that we all experience, but which in Sedaris’s voice are brilliantly and grotesquely magnified.   Written for everyone who loves David Sedaris and has wondered why they find him so relevant to their own lives, Sedaris succeeds in taking seriously this sublimely caustic, riotously funny, and ultimately important writer. And for anyone unfamiliar with Sedaris, this book is the perfect introduction.   Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His previous books include Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk (Minnesota, 2004).