Dry, offbeat, and mostly profane, this debut collection of humorous nonfiction glorifies all things inappropriate and TMI. A compendia of probing essays, lists, profiles, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, and overly revealing memoir, How to Be Inappropriate adds up to the portrait of an artist who bumbles through life obsessed with one thing: extreme impropriety.
In How to Be Inappropriate, Daniel Nester determines the boundary of acceptable behavior by completely disregarding it. As a twenty-something hipster, 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 on mooning and attempts to cast a spell on a neighbor who fails to curb his dog. He befriends exiled video game king Todd Rogers, re-imagines a conversation with NPR's Terry Gross, and invents a robot version of Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.
No matter which misadventure catches their eye in this eclectic series of essays, How to Be Inappropriate makes readers appreciate that someone else has experienced these embarrassing sides of life, so that they won't have to. Daniel Nester is the author most recently of the memoir Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects. His previous books include How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction, and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On, are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third, The History of My World Tonight, is a book of poems.
As a journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Salon, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and The Atlantic. The former editor of the online journals Unpleasant Event Schedule and La Petite Zine as well as Painted Bride Quarterly and the sestinas section of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, he currently edits Pine Hills Review, the literary journal of The College of Saint Rose, where is also an associate professor of English.
