Confessions of the Fox
Confessions of the Fox is a novel by American writer and academic Jordy Rosenberg, first published in 2018. It re-imagines the lives of Jack Sheppard, eighteenth-century English thief and jail-breaker, and his lover Edgeworth Bess. Plot. The novel is structured as a story within a story. A 21st-century academic, Dr Voth, discovers a manuscript that claims to be the confessions of Jack Sheppard. The manuscript reveals that Sheppard (like Voth) is a transgender man, and describes his experience of transitioning gender. It also reveals that Bess is of South Asian (Lascar) descent  and that she grew up in the Fens. The manuscript documents Sheppard's love affair with Bess, their criminal escapades, their memories of childhood, and their run-ins with authority. Voth's annotations to the manuscript begin as scholarly comments on its likely authenticity but soon become more personal, comically documenting his recent break-up and his difficulties at work. The novel offers satirical commentary on historical and contemporary political issues, including over-policing and surveillance, racism, the dredging of the Fens, and managerialism in 21st-century universities. In fictionalizing Sheppard's story, the novel continues a tradition established by  Daniel Defoe, John Gay ("The Beggar's Opera"), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ("The Threepenny Opera"). Critical reception. The novel was named a "book of the year" by the "New Yorker", "Huffington Post" and "Kirkus Reviews". It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.