Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation

Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation

by Michael Lowenthal

Released February 9, 2026

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.

Michael Lowenthal is the author of the novels The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl, and The Paternity Test and of the short story collection Sex with Strangers. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Out, and many other publications. His stories have been widely anthologized.