About The Book

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a lapsed teacher who is guilty of having had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man’s crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: in the name of love, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. The Sex Offender is at once a burlesque of the State and an unmasking of the foundations on which our notions of love and psychological health are based. In lavish prose, it weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

Praise

“Equal parts Kafka, Burgess, and Brazil, Matthew Stadler’s novel is beautifully morbid. The eloquent, florid prose in which Mr. Uh Uh describes his passions gives him an overwrought nobility. . . . Stadler’s narrative weaves in and out of humor, grandiosity, fantasy, and sentiment with rare grace and cleverness.”—The Village Voice

“A daring, controversial, necessary book.”—Lynne Tillman

‘stadler writes with wit and precision, cleverly dramatizing the dialectical nature of social truths.”—Publishers Weekly