Valerie Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality.

"Belief in causality's legibility is a cause well lost for Valerie Rohy. Her provocative new book, Lost Causes, brings out the queer contingency of things and brilliantly examines the effects-at once social, political, and interpretative-of living with indeterminacy. The result should cause all to take note."-Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

"In Lost Causes, Valerie Rohy brilliantly deconstructs a long tradition of gay etiology, not to ask the usual illogical questions about the causes of homosexuality, but to ask why we ask and how we ask. She offers us a refreshing new way to read those great novels of gay origins-all those pictures of Dorian Gray and those wells of loneliness, which are more elusive than we often think."-Ellis Hanson, author of Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film

"...There is no doubt that Lost Causes will find enthusiastic readers among literary scholars and queer theorists." -- Jana Funke, University of Exeter