How to Be Inappropriate

Dry, offbeat, and mostly profane, this debut collection of humorous nonfiction glorifies all things inappropriate and TMI. Arguments, lists, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, profiles, and overly revealing memoirettes, How to Be Inappropriate adds up to the portrait of a twenty-something-become-thirty-something, bachelor-become-husband, boy-man-about-town who bumbles through life obsessed with one thing: extreme impropriety.

In How to Be Inappropriate, Daniel Nester determines the boundary of acceptable behavior — mostly by disregarding it. As a here-to-cut-a-hipster-swathe-through-the-city man, he looks for love with a Williamsburg abstract painter who has had her feet licked for money. As a teacher, he tries out curse words with Chinese students in ESL classes. Along the way, Nester provides a short cultural history of mooning and attempts to cast a spell on a neighbor who fails to curb his dog. He befriends exiled video-game king Todd Rogers, and reimagines Terry Gross's Fresh Air conversation with — and invents a robot version of — Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.

No matter which misadventure catches your eye, How to Be Inappropriate will make you appreciate that someone else has experienced these embarrassing sides of life so that you won't have to.

"[Nester's] stories are, as the title suggests, inappropriate, and they often engender squeamishness, discomfort, and laughter. But they are fresh and, at times, touching, qualities that make this an enjoyable read." Library Journal

"Daniel Nester is a stone-cold genius. Clever, lyrical, inappropriate in all the right ways — I'd rather read him than just about anyone right now." Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You

"If there was Nobel Prize for Achievement in Inappropriateness, Daniel Nester would be Laureate of the Universe. Until then, he'll have to settle for having written this shockingly innovative stunner of a book. Nester brings his irreverent, elegiac sensibility to subjects from ranging from the essence of literary truth to the enduring mystery of flatulence, managing in the bargain to highlight the bleak hilarity of human existence — which, when you think about it, is the most inappropriate thing of all." Rachel Shukert, author of Have You No Shame?

"Daniel Nester is funny as hell." Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

"Daniel Nester's essays are haunted by a Victorian perversity. His writing exhibits a kind of Tourrette syndrome in which the author continuously abases himself and revels in his own shortcomings. It's a painful kind of comedy leavened by gentle good humor and wonder." Thomas Beller, author of The Sleep-Over Artist and How To Be a Man

Daniel Nester's writing has appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Open City, Nerve, The Daily Beast, The Best American Poetry, Time Out New York, The Morning News, The Bloomsbury Review, Poets & Writers, and Bookslut. He is the former Sestinas editor for McSweeney’s and teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife and daughter.