My Dead Book

A rumination on survival, queer aging, and estrangement that was a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them.

Haunted by insomnia and the past as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, the narrator of My Dead Book flips through scenes of his youth and memories of dozens of friends who are no longer with him. Living alone and working odd jobs in Wisconsin, he ruminates on survival, queer aging, his years as a teenage throwaway, and estrangement, wondering whether he has outlived his place in the world.

First published in 2021, Lippens’s debut novel was hailed as “a brutally acerbic novel of queer pessimism” (Donna Marcus, AnOther Magazine). As Lindsay Lerman observed in Southwest Review, “My Dead Book is not transgressive because it follows a gay man as he struggles to survive on the fringes of multiple worlds. … It is continually transgressing. It’s a living book (a living dead book), moving around in time, making tangential connections.”

This new edition includes an introduction by LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer, Eileen Myles.

Nate Lippens’s My Dead Book was a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His second novel, Ripcord, will be published in 2024 by Semiotext(e) (US) and Pilot Press (UK). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (2022).

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 2022. a “Working Life”, their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.