Book Review: Yr Dead

A blazing, original debut from Sam Sax

I’m starting a series of short reviews of noteworthy 2024 fiction titles, starting with Sam Sax’s Yr Dead (published by McSweeny’s).

Yr Dead, which has been longlisted for the National Book Award, is Sax’s first novel, technically speaking, as Sax has heretofore been primarily a poet, with three books of poetry under their belt. Yes, Sax uses plural pronouns: Their dust jacket bio self-identifies Sax as “a queer, Jewish writer.” And there’s a whole lot of both—that is, details of Sax’s queerness and Jewishness—in the novel.

But is this indeed Sax whom we are reading about in this novel? Well, yes, as much as we assume any first-person narrator who shares a demographic profile with the author. Perhaps more so here, as Yr Dead is one devastatingly personal novel that peels back several layers of psychological infeeblements, details sexual specifications, and exposes private trauma in blinding light in ways that one can only assume one learns from experience.