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.