Name: Paula Bomer launches "The Stalker," in conversation with Sam Lipsyte
Start: 2025-05-27T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-05-27T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Paula Bomer launches "The Stalker," in conversation with Sam Lipsyte

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“Brilliant, disturbing, and hilarious" —Vogue; "Dark and twisted fun" —Publishers Weekly

Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA

<h3>Join us for the launch of The Stalker, Paula Bomer's thrilling novel about an "Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho" attempting to manipulate his way through New York City in the early '90s.</h3>Author Paula Bomer will be joined by award-winning writer Sam Lipsyte for a reading, conversation, signing, and reception.<a href="https://shop.loftypigeonbooks.com/item/z5gDKBmobYsH3lD41vJLrg" title="https://shop.loftypigeonbooks.com/item/z5gDKBmobYsH3lD41vJLrg" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Preorder your copy of The Stalker here!</a> <h3>About The Stalker</h3>Vogue’s Best Books of the Year Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year Robert Doughten Savile, aka “Doughty,” is the son of a once-wealthy, now hard-up family from Darien, Connecticut. Doughty lives in a perpetual cloud of delusion, convinced of his own genius and status. While he has little capacity to accurately assess his own abilities or prospects, he cruises through life on the sheer force of his own sense of entitlement, dropping out of college and landing in the early ’90s in New York City, a place brimming with both prosperity and desperation. He cons his way from a bed at the YMCA into the posh Soho loft of a middle-aged book editor, while pursuing a young bartender, whom he also abuses and gaslights. He spins elaborate tales about his imaginary high-power job in real estate while, in reality, he passes his days watching comedy specials on VHS, smoking crack in Tompkins Square Park, and engaging in occasional sex work in the restrooms of Grand Central Station. His many failures, however, only serve to sharpen his one true gift: Doughty is a skilled predator, and the damage he inflicts on the women around him is real and remorseless. As shocking as it is illuminating, The Stalker confirms Paula Bomer as a contemporary master of the pitch-black comic novel. Advance praise for The Stalker“Brilliant, disturbing, and hilarious . . . [Doughty’s] deficiencies only make Bomer’s perverse odyssey more compelling. . . . For all the obvious comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley or Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, Doughty also serves as a male counterpart of Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a blond narcissist who stares out onto a vanished Manhattan skyline through a cloud of drugs, desperation, and delusion. The final pages, as in Moshfegh’s work, will move readers with their unlikely and ultimately transcendent beauty.” —Vogue“Rarely does a book come along that rearranges perception and sings with psychological acuity. The Stalker is an impeccable character study of the least self-aware man on earth. How often do we get to see a monster from his own vantage? With Paula Bomer in charge, a stylist of the highest order, I wanted to follow him anywhere. This novel is heart-pounding, endlessly entertaining, and in complete touch with humanity. Risky and brilliant, dark as hell and bitingly comic as only the masters can pull off. Wholly satisfying to the final glorious moment.” —Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot“Bomer tracks the increasingly threatening behavior of a sociopath in her excellent and shocking latest. . . . As Doughty insinuates his way into the lives and homes of [two] women, the novel enters into genuinely disturbing territory. Bomer is equally adept at rendering Doughty’s warped psychology as she is with injecting dark humor into the proceedings. . . . This is dark and twisted fun.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review“Unsettling. . . . A compelling character study. Bomer has created an antagonist who is a unique blend of an even more troubled Holden Caulfield mixed with a less appealing Patrick Bateman. Readers’ desire for Doughty to receive karmic retribution will propel them forward through the thriller’s disconcerting content.” —Booklist <h3>About the author</h3>Paula Bomer is the author of the novels Tante Eva and Nine Months and the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and Other Stories, as well as the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Fiction, and The Mississippi Review. <h3>About Sam Lipsyte</h3>Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and five novels: Hark; The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book); The Subject Steve; Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award, and most recently, No One Left to Come Looking for You. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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Paula Bomer launches "The Stalker," in conversation with Sam Lipsyte

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