Author of the week: Sam Lipsyte

last updated 8 January 2015

Sam Lipsyte wants to reclaim his nerd cred, said Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal. One of the stories in the writer’s new book, The Fun Parts, concerns a group of suburban teens who play Dungeons and Dragons under a tyrannical leader, known in the role-playing game as a dungeon master. When the story first ran in The New Yorker in 2010, many real-life gamers criticized it. “People said I was a poser,” says Lipsyte. “Some said I wasn’t a real gamer, that I didn’t even get the rules right.” Yet Lipsyte took Dungeons and Dragons very seriously when he was young. The piece, he says, was loosely based on his experiences in middle and high school, when he played the game with friends. “I had a particularly cruel dungeon master. I never rose too high because I got killed in some random way.”

Lipsyte thinks D&D may have even inspired his choice of career, said Abraham Riesman in Vol1Brooklyn.com. “I became a writer because I couldn’t be a dungeon master,” he says. “I think that I wanted that control over a world, so I turned to fiction.” The skills needed for the game, he says, proved useful for plotting novels. “When you’re writing, you’re both the dungeon master and one of the players,” he says. “It’s kind of like creating problems for yourself to solve.”