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Ripcord
A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest.The oldest an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground.In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.
- GenresLGBT
160 pages, Paperback
Expected publication October 22, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 16, 2024
Nate Lippens is one of those authors who makes you feel like you're not trying hard enough to craft the perfect sentence, not digging deep enough to relate your truest feelings, calling Nate a "writer's writer" seems a tad too dismissive of the reverence that I have for his work. Read this book, you won't regret it... or maybe you will.
September 24, 2024
I didn't think Nate Lippens could top My Dead Book (not sure ANYONE can!), but oh my God, Ripcord is a dark diamond that sparkles blindingly on every page. Each paragraph is a shovelful of gloom and wit burying you deeper and deeper as Lippens unspools a life of queer struggle and survival in the Midwest.
It's hard to convey just how perfectly Ripcord blends relentless self-examination, emotional nakedness, beautiful (Lutz-worthy) craftsman-like sentences, and dark humor (the word hilarious seems too silly, but it is indeed hilarious at times). While reading this book, I started to wonder: Is this my favorite book of all time now? Perhaps it is. Maybe it is. All I know is that I'm in awe.
A fragmented, beautiful autofiction of the highest quality.
It's hard to convey just how perfectly Ripcord blends relentless self-examination, emotional nakedness, beautiful (Lutz-worthy) craftsman-like sentences, and dark humor (the word hilarious seems too silly, but it is indeed hilarious at times). While reading this book, I started to wonder: Is this my favorite book of all time now? Perhaps it is. Maybe it is. All I know is that I'm in awe.
A fragmented, beautiful autofiction of the highest quality.
June 24, 2024
My thanks to Pilot Press for the ARC.
Ripcord, for me, read like the angry big brother to Nate’s debut, My Dead Book. Written in a time-fracturing series of dazzling vignettes, it follows the same format as My Dead Book, the troubled narrator musing on anything from class to sex to loneliness to connection, and how hard that connection is for queer people, especially queer people as they age. The only difference, is that in Ripcord, the anger is palpable. My Dead Book was about loss, whereas Ripcord seems to be about the anger that surrounds such loss. You can hear the snarling rage of the narrator, stuck in a world that doesn’t care, in a world that refuses to love him back. This is a book of queer pain. Of homelessness and addiction. Of junkies and poets and artists. Of snatches of love found in cars, in toilet stalls, huddled briefly between blankets, before disappearing again with the dawn. It is not a happy book. Although there are as many laugh out loud moments as there are painfully resurrected memories. It is both harrowing and hilarious. A fearless reckoning. Elegiac, precise, irreverent and viciously unsentimental. If I was the type, I’d have underlined every other line.
Did I occasionally itch for some actual story, or some sort of through-line? Yes, I have to be honest, I did, but that’s on me, for this is not that sort of book. This is the sort of book that creeps up on you. That deserves to be studied. That makes you think. It’s the sort of book to be savoured. Every word, every line, every razor-sharp sliver of flamboyant wisdom. Is it a memoir or a novel? A series of cynical meditations? A damaged stream of consciousness? A philosophy paper? A list of doomed anecdotes? A queer disruption of the traditional narrative? Or perhaps a broken collage on the relentless futility of growing old in a world that doesn’t care? Who knows. But what I do know, is that you won’t read anything else quite like it all year, and that can only be a good thing.
Ripcord is out on the 22nd October, via Semiotexte in the US, and Pilot Press in the UK.
Ripcord, for me, read like the angry big brother to Nate’s debut, My Dead Book. Written in a time-fracturing series of dazzling vignettes, it follows the same format as My Dead Book, the troubled narrator musing on anything from class to sex to loneliness to connection, and how hard that connection is for queer people, especially queer people as they age. The only difference, is that in Ripcord, the anger is palpable. My Dead Book was about loss, whereas Ripcord seems to be about the anger that surrounds such loss. You can hear the snarling rage of the narrator, stuck in a world that doesn’t care, in a world that refuses to love him back. This is a book of queer pain. Of homelessness and addiction. Of junkies and poets and artists. Of snatches of love found in cars, in toilet stalls, huddled briefly between blankets, before disappearing again with the dawn. It is not a happy book. Although there are as many laugh out loud moments as there are painfully resurrected memories. It is both harrowing and hilarious. A fearless reckoning. Elegiac, precise, irreverent and viciously unsentimental. If I was the type, I’d have underlined every other line.
Did I occasionally itch for some actual story, or some sort of through-line? Yes, I have to be honest, I did, but that’s on me, for this is not that sort of book. This is the sort of book that creeps up on you. That deserves to be studied. That makes you think. It’s the sort of book to be savoured. Every word, every line, every razor-sharp sliver of flamboyant wisdom. Is it a memoir or a novel? A series of cynical meditations? A damaged stream of consciousness? A philosophy paper? A list of doomed anecdotes? A queer disruption of the traditional narrative? Or perhaps a broken collage on the relentless futility of growing old in a world that doesn’t care? Who knows. But what I do know, is that you won’t read anything else quite like it all year, and that can only be a good thing.
Ripcord is out on the 22nd October, via Semiotexte in the US, and Pilot Press in the UK.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews