Andrew Lipstein
Hi. I’m Andrew Lipstein.
My debut novel Last Resort was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK.
My second novel The Vegan was published in July 2023, also by FSG and W&N.
My third novel Something Rotten will be published in January 2025.
I live in Brooklyn with my wife and three sons.
Photograph by Peter Senzamici
US Publicity: Jillian Briglia at Farrar, Straus & Giroux
UK Publicity: Jenna Petts at Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Literary agent: Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group
TV/Film: Kassie Evashevski at Anonymous Content
a.i.lipstein [at] gmail [dot] com
My writing has appeared in Harper’s, Interview, Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, The Millions, VICE, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, Electric Literature & more.
I founded & run 0s&1s, a digital bookstore featuring interviews, featured in The Guardian, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers & more.
I co-founded The Neu Jorker, a cover-to-cover parody of The New Yorker, featured in The New York Times, WIRED, Adweek, The Onion's AV Club, Splitsider & more.
I co-founded Paul Ryan magazine, featured in A.V. Club, Mashable, The Daily Dot, Paste (feature, excerpt), PopSugar, The Washington Post, P*O*T*U*S on Sirius XM, Slate's Political Gabfest & more.
I graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
Something Rotten
(2025)
“[F]ascinating ... tense ... The revelations, when they come, are satisfying, and meaty considerations of ethics and truth round out the novel’s entertaining depiction of an American innocent abroad and his European Svengali. This razor-sharp morality tale is Lipstein’s best yet.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“One of Lipstein’s gifts is his slipperiness—just as the reader feels a character’s foibles are being mocked or even pitied, the target shapeshifts, the moral questions twisting and dissolving … Lipstein knows his way around a plot. An interrogation of the nature of truth, virtue, and reality, cloaked as a page-turning novel of escalating crises.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Something Rotten is (characteristically, for this author) an irreverent book; often funny, at times caustic. Andrew Lipstein’s refreshingly frank third novel probes the more discomfiting questions—about marriage and fidelity, fathers and sons, cancel culture and propriety, sex and gender, ambition and motivation—of modern life.”
— Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement
“My favorite kind of book—a funny, wise, aching story about cross-cultural confusion and twenty-first century masculinity. It’s personal and global in equal measure.”
— Jesse Eisenberg, actor and director
“What begins as a summer escape ends as a trial by fire as a young couple grapples with their biggest mistakes, their most heartbreaking inner demons, and their sneaking suspicion that the way they’ve been living is entirely wrong. A bold and riveting new novel about the search for truth when truth lingers maddeningly out of reach. I loved it.”
— Nathan Hill, author of Wellness
“Few novels are willing to confront the stormy waters that lie between personhood, parenthood, the imagined life and reality. Our best novelists have it all right in front of them, if they possess the talent to look up and see. There may be something rotten in the state of Denmark, or the state of manhood, but the net result in Something Rotten is a book about a vacation that is both outrageous and very funny. Sometimes, in these ultra-serious times, we are apt to forget that fiction, in its origins, is a comic form. Andrew Lipstein provides a reminder, and his latest novel is a brilliant antidote to the nonsense of now.”
— Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road
“A riveting, original story of fatherhood and masculinity and the ways our cultural narratives can deform both. In pursuit of deeper truths, Lipstein fills his book with psychological insight, surprising twists and gorgeous writing.”
— Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn
“Something Rotten is an outraged and up-to-the-minute satire of American masculinity and nationalism that cleverly uses its setting—Copenhagen, Denmark—as a dark mirror to America's psychoses. A funny, moving, and surprising bicontinental novel.”
— Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
“Andrew Lipstein's Something Rotten follows a man who's recently been canceled—a word that had ‘long become meaningless,’ ‘a relic from another time, like yuppie, hipster, millennial’—and his exhausted wife as they flee New York with their baby for a summer in Copenhagen. There, Lipstein weaves a twisty tale exploring masculinity, deceit, and love with cutting precision.”
— Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain
The Vegan
(2023)
Named a New York Times Critics’ Pick of the Year
Named a Must-Read Book of the Year by Time
Named a Must-Read Book of the Year by Elle
A most anticipated book from The New York Times • Vanity Fair • ELLE • Town & Country • Shondaland • i-D • Lit Hub & more
“Ingenious … Not since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals has a Brooklyn writer made so plain a case for greater sensitivity to the natural world. And The Vegan, a pig in a blanket of irony, subversion and humor, is much easier to swallow.”
— The New York Times
“[The Vegan] sets a series of dead-serious moral traps for its protagonist … but is also very funny, and Lipstein's writing voice is sleek and constrained.”
— New York magazine
“Thought-provoking ... eloquent ... propulsive.”
— Los Angeles Times
“The writing is lilting, grandiose, dense, run-ons full of action and metaphor. It reads like if Martin Amis wrote Money about a more distinguished salesman … Lipstein asks us to investigate what's harmed and what's lost in our relentless progression, and what sacrifices might be necessary to stop the forward march.”
— NPR
“At once bracingly contemporary and deeply strange ... The Vegan channels the queasy paranoia of an era when the fear of human extinction via machine learning can make even masters of the universe feel like trapped animals.”
— TIME magazine
“A propulsive, wild ride.”
— Vanity Fair
“Engrossing … there’s genuine suspense in Lipstein’s meaty novel of ideas. This is well worth the investment.”
— Publishers Weekly
“[The Vegan] uses juxtaposition to surprising effect: philosophy mixes with financial thriller, high capitalism with animalia … A topsy-turvy investigation of that most disorienting question: What does it mean to be a good person?”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Ethics and exploitation come to the fore in ... a lunatic satire about corporate America … real suspense … a frantic, almost hysterically told story.”
— Wall Street Journal
“One of my favourite books … poignant, but also really funny and lightly written ... grapples with ethical questions in a really sensitive way.”
— Financial Times
“The Vegan skewers capitalism, consumerism, and milquetoast morality in its pointed teeth.”
— ELLE
“Greed, The Vegan implies . . . needn’t involve backstabbing. It can be as passive as eating lamb shawarma for lunch . . . Keeps the growing genre fresh.”
— The Washington Post
“[The Vegan] explores an elaborate idea, but Lipstein's limpid prose makes it both intelligible and persuasive.”
— Literary Review
“Exquisite … perfectly pitched between farce and poignancy.”
— i newspaper
“A meaty comedy with a bleeding heart, highly recommended for all animals who read.”
— Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus
“You will want to tear through this ingenious tale in one sitting, but I urge you to resist and wallow in the strange, hilarious, whip-smart world Andrew Lipstein has built. Exacting, upending and constantly surprising, I loved this novel.”
— Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest
“Andrew Lipstein’s hilarious, acid-tart, spot-on, and deeply unnerving novel The Vegan follows its privileged narrator as his inability to tolerate his own guilt and complicity deranges him. We can't turn away as he follows his impulse, both righteous and ridiculous, to burn it all down. Lipstein has written a precise, weird, and wildly propulsive take on modern American ethical and moral bankruptcy.”
— Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“The Vegan is the weirdest novel I’ve read in ages. In a good way. A genre unto itself. Skillfully written and strangely addictive.”
— Lionel Shriver, author of Should We Stay or Should We Go
“I ignored house and home to read this propulsive story of impulse, guilt, and resolve. A dazzling and resonant allegory for our moral moment.”
— Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir
“A fresh, witty, masterfully crafted morality tale for the modern age. Lipstein has conceived an unforgettable character, terrifyingly real, who could have walked out of an episode of Succession. I absolutely (bordering on obsessively) loved this novel.”
— Virginia Feito, author of Mrs. March
“In his engrossing new novel, Andrew Lipstein has produced a feverish, fantastically surprising parable about guilt, money, and (curveball) the lives of animals. It reads like the unholy offspring of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Julio Cortázar's cosmic short fiction, or Crime and Punishment for the Brooklyn brownstone set. I tore through it.”
— Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America
“The Vegan is a literary journey as carnal as it is clever. Comedic, profound, and charmingly weird, Lipstein’s second novel is irresistible fare for all bibliovores. Eat up.”
— Mark Prins, author of The Latinist
“I tore through Andrew Lipstein’s second novel. Smart, fresh, funny, strangely moving, wonderfully weird and beautifully written, The Vegan is just a terrific book.”
— Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
“A funny, intelligent page-turner, The Vegan explores what it means to have self-determination and to take it from another—or to have it taken from you. It unfolds in a delectably paranoid fever dream that possesses a Kafkaesque strangeness, humor, and moral terror. One of the most entertaining and beguiling novels I’ve read in years. Lipstein has quickly joined the ranks of my favorite contemporary novelists.”
— Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
“A sharply observed literary novel with elements of satire and intrigue baked into the mix, The Vegan is a deftly told morality tale for our time.”
— Jonathan Tropper, author of One Last Thing Before I Go
“The Vegan is unexpectedly hilarious in the face of doom. Andrew Lipstein has managed to create gruesomely cinematic scenes within a contemporary landscape of greed, and it's amazing to watch.”
— Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
“With mind-bending skillfulness, The Vegan plumbs the back alleys of morality without ever moralizing. This is storytelling that feels sharply contemporary, dizzyingly intelligent, and utterly original.”
— Allegra Hyde, author of The Last Catastrophe
Last Resort (2022)
Named a Top 10 Book of the Year by Slate
Named a 2022 Best Book by The New Yorker
Named a 2022 Best Book by Vulture
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
“Wicked fun . . . Splayed across these pages is the dark terror that lurks within any creative person’s breast . . . As Lipstein skewers the pretensions and delusions of literary ambition, he reveals the mental tricks that allow writers to imagine that they care only for art, not money or fame . . . [A] deliciously absurd comedy about literary fame.”
— The Washington Post
“[An] anti-Künstlerroman . . . not about the formation of genuine artists but about the self-destruction of phony ones . . . [a thriller] about, of all things, intellectual property . . . incredibly entertaining . . . Lipstein milks the comedy of [their] traits almost as well as Kingsley Amis did in Lucky Jim.”
— The New York Times
(A New York Times Editors’ Choice)
"Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain … The book's command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise."
— The New Yorker
“Andrew Lipstein’s almost perfectly plotted debut novel on a topic — creative envy and artistic theft — that tastes like catnip to many readers of literary fiction . . . has one of the best endings in recent memory . . . You’ll think about [Last Resort] for weeks after you read the last pages.”
— The Los Angeles Times
“You won’t read a more brilliantly executed literary romp this year … An unsparing satire of a generation of millennials who fear that their lives lack gravitas and emotional depth”
— The Guardian
“Talent is rare, which is why I let out a big yippee reading Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort … Lipstein doesn’t just blast chunks out of the inflated artifice of New York’s literary scene, he turns his fire on the city at large too.”
— The Times (of London)
“A brilliant morality tale about what happens when a person refuses to learn from their mistakes, all the way down to the final scene, which had me laughing out loud and punching the air.”
— Vulture
“Luminous … tantalizing … to be applauded for its frank depiction of the tussle between art and commerce.”
— The Times Literary Supplement
“A funny, fast-paced literary satire.”
— The Daily Telegraph
"This smart and mean little novel [gives] a delectable twist to the deathless question of who owns a story ... I couldn't stop reading it, and felt absolutely grubby afterwards—what a joy."
— Slate
“A blissfully wicked work of art ... [a] lightning-streak of a novel”
— Interview magazine
“A perfectly Pninian ending.”
— Vanity Fair
“Throws into sharp relief . . . thorny dilemmas about art, ethics, and what being a writer really means. Lipstein wittily captures all the savagery of the publishing industry, from Goodreads reviews to awkward author photos. But for all the metafictional layers here, at its heart [Last Resort] is a surprisingly traditional, almost Dickensian, story about the vagaries of fate. For anyone who can’t look away from a juicy literary scandal.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“As funny and fast-paced as it is sharp and cutting.”
— Monocle
“Very funny ... absolutely loved it ... a total delight ... I ate it up.”
— Slate’s Culture Gabfest
“One of the finest and funniest send-ups of the art world in years.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Last Resort is a kunstlerroman if the kunst were limited to promotion. Thankfully, Andrew Lipstein suffers from none of his characters' limitations. There's a line in this excerpt, ‘But flaws need sympathy...’ that does a lot to explain why Lipstein's book is such a success.”
— The Brooklyn Rail
“Last Resort satisfies that yen for literary scandal … [Lipstein's] wit and elan propel the novel to its sly ending.”
—National Book Review
“The novel [asks us] to look much deeper than lines of text … The book and its ideas serve as provocative conversation starters … Last Resort gives us a reflection on the messiness of life and art—how their respective messes and meaning making are one in the same.”
— Chicago Review of Books
“If there's nothing new under the sun, can anyone be original without lying? Would truth still be stranger than fiction if people were honest in real life? This fast-paced simulacrum of a commercial novel is not out to please the critics. I finished it in a day.”
— Nell Zink, author of Mislaid
“Last Resort is a witty, propulsive and often mesmerizing novel, a kind of creative-class thriller, full of wry social observation and subtle emotional textures, and it builds beautifully toward a bracing showdown between knowingness and self-knowledge. With its insular milieu and quality lit namechecks, not to mention its quasi-satirical anxiety of auto-fictional influence, Andrew Lipstein plays a risky game, and he plays it superbly, with feeling.”
— Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“A brilliant take on what it means to be an artist in a world of endless compromises. Look out, Faust, there's a new sheriff in town.”
— Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success
“Last Resort is a rare accomplishment, a novel of ideas—about art, authorship, money, ethics—with the momentum of a great thriller.”
— Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
“A darkly comical thriller about writers and publishers, emulation and betrayal, written in an excitingly careful, clear, and original prose style.”
— Tao Lin, author of Leave Society
“Last Resort is a strange and beguiling book about the contrivances, connivances and mysteries of creation, with an especially visceral depiction of male anxiety and an absolutely blistering end. A terrific debut.”
— Joshua Ferris, author of A Calling for Charlie Barnes
“Lipstein asks the timely question: does one possess sole title to one’s own story? A sharply written, headlong romp.”
— Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
"A propulsive tale of American literary ambition, this novel exposes the status-hunger that motivates plenty of writing—far more than writers like to admit. A keenly observed and sharp-witted debut that’s assured from first page to last."
— Tom Rachman, author of The Imperfectionists
"With its seductive, chilled intelligence and frictionless style, Last Resort plunged me summarily into a one-sitting read. I came up for air awed by this sophisticated, high-stakes moral drama."
— Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue
“If Less by Andrew Sean Greer left a hole in your life, good news: Last Resort will fill it. Fast and funny, it feels like a backstage pass to the book world.”
— Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss
“Last Resort raises incisive questions about authorship, the tension between art and commerce, and the elusive nature of self-fulfillment, all while unspooling a compelling story with humor and great suspense. I didn't want it to end."
— Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things
“Last Resort is witty, profound and blisteringly intelligent. Andrew Lipstein asks major questions about ambition and authenticity and artistic ethics, while keeping me frantically turning the pages to see what happens next. A fantastic, fast-paced and deeply funny novel.”
— Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
“Authenticity and possession of stories are the surface themes of Last Resort, but it is really about ambition and emptiness, about a callow young man with nothing to say self-destructively looking for shortcuts in literature and life. But the great irony is that Andrew Lipstein's impeccably written debut has quite a lot to say, and, as with the best comic novels, his semi-hero's misadventures have an undertow of real sadness.”
— Teddy Wayne, author of Loner
“A delightfully nightmarish satirical chronicle of one young author’s reckoning with the consequences of his own blind ambition. Caleb’s journey had me cringing with pure pleasure.”
— Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth and Panorama City
“I loved Last Resort. It takes so many surprising and brilliant turns: it is fun and witty, and rollicks through the pains and joys of writing and having your name on a book jacket (or not). And Caleb Horowitz is exactly the kind of character I love to hate: self-justifying but reflective, self-centred but loving.”
— Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
“Last Resort is one of those novels about writing guaranteed to make every novelist who reads it blush with its unsparing portrayal of greed, obsession and smug superiority. Wickedly funny: I loved it.”
— Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter