Jordy Rosenberg Books in Order

Jordy Rosenberg is a novelist, scholar, and teacher whose work moves between eighteenth-century history, queer and trans life, politics, and comic invention. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is also associated faculty in its MFA Program for Poets and Writers.

Before publishing fiction, Rosenberg built a career as a literary scholar. He earned a BA from Wesleyan University, then an MA and PhD from Cornell University. His 2011 study, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion, looks at religion, feeling, and money in the eighteenth century, subjects that later show up in very different form in his novels.

That background gives his fiction a lot to play with. Archives, old stories, institutional power, and the language people use to name themselves are not just research topics for Rosenberg. They become material for jokes, arguments, suspense, and love stories.

His first novel, Confessions of the Fox, arrived in 2018. It takes the real eighteenth-century English jailbreaker Jack Sheppard and imagines a new life around him, one told through a supposedly lost manuscript found by the troubled scholar Dr. R. Voth. The book shifts between London’s criminal underworld and Voth’s footnotes, where an editor’s private life and professional pressures start to crowd the page.

Readers who pick it up for the heists and escapes also find a queer romance, a puzzle about historical evidence, and a sharp look at who gets left out of official records. Confessions of the Fox was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was shortlisted for several first-novel and LGBTQ literary prizes, including the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.

In 2026, Rosenberg published Night Night Fawn, a very different kind of novel with the same interest in voice, conflict, and social pressure. Its narrator, Barbara Rosenberg, lies dying in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and tries to tell her version of a life shaped by family grudges, an estranged trans son, old friendships, gender, politics, and a great deal of self-justification.

The result is a dark family satire rather than a historical adventure. Rosenberg lets Barbara ramble, perform, complain, and contradict herself, while the novel keeps asking what people hide from themselves and what harm can travel through a family.

Fiction is only one part of Rosenberg's working life. He has also co-edited Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism and The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century, and his essays have appeared in academic journals and public-facing venues. Fellowships and residencies from organizations including MacDowell, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the Ahmanson-Getty Foundation have supported his work.

At UMass Amherst, Rosenberg’s areas include British literature, gender and sexuality, the history of the book, Marxist literary studies, and theory and culture. The classroom and the archive remain part of the picture.

Across his books, he returns to people trying to make a livable story from histories and systems that would rather define them from the outside.