MY DEAD BOOK: A NOVEL by Nate Lippens

Title: My Dead Book: A Novel
Author(s)/Editor(s): Nate Lippens
Publisher: Pilot Press
Pages: 143
Dimensions: 120 × 190 mm
Format: Softcover
Year: 2022

“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It’s as if the storied stars of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It’s a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn’t love pills?”

— Derek McCormack

“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”

— Eileen Myles

“This book by Nate Lippens is really moving and beautifully written. Not one superfluous sentence. It’s razor tight. The phantom limbs of what has been excised remains. But still there is so much love and sadness and all the randomness of what makes a life, and who you meet along the way. My ghosts are summoned by his ghosts.”

— Hedi El Kholti

Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). My Dead Book is his first novel.