Fiction. In this brilliantly rendered, LA Times Book Prize nominated debut collection (as well as Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Sara Lippmann draws the reader into the intimate lives of characters seeking connection beyond their scripted worlds. She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, isolated characters in DOLL PALACE are united by conflicting desires and the private struggles of the heart. A girl ditches her innocence at a state fair. Strippers ponder love over a Brazilian wax. A father falls for a drug-addled babysitter. A mother ends a pregnancy. DOLL PALACE dwells in the harder-edged territories of human compassion, navigating the powerful, often unsettling ground rarely spoken of with awareness, care, and grace. DOLL PALACE is that rare collection that invites imitation but leaves a vast majority wondering how she did it.

Doll Palace

Literature & Fiction

Lippmann, Sara

Short Stories & Anthologies

Dock Street Press

In this brilliantly rendered, LA Times Book Prize nominated debut collection (as well as Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Sara Lippmann draws the reader into the intimate lives of characters seeking connection beyond their scripted worlds. She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires and the private struggles of the heart. A girl ditches her innocence at a state fair. Strippers ponder love over a Brazilian wax. A father falls for a drug-addled babysitter. A mother ends a pregnancy. Doll Palace dwells in the harder-edged territories of human compassion, navigating the powerful, often unsettling ground rarely spoken of with awareness, care, and grace. In this debut collection previously published by Dock Street Press, Doll Palace is that rare collection that invites imitation but leaves a vast majority wondering how she did it.

United States

7.13 Books

** A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK according to The Millions, The Rumpus, NYLON, Chicago Review of Books, Bustle, and Vol.1 Brooklyn **\nA mother recovering from an abortion in a Borscht Belt rental. An eccentric aging landlord, haunted by a mysterious death. A grief-stricken Hasid. A scheming real estate agent looking for her break, her dogged daughter longing for her way out (specifically, a career as a human mermaid), and her addict boyfriend mired in it.\nThese lives—strangers, neighbors, family, friends—entwine and separate over the course of one fevered upstate summer, in a haunting and hilarious debut novel by acclaimed author Sara Lippmann. In her inimitable prose, she mercilessly explores the predatory side of human nature through conflicts of faith, trauma, desire, belonging, and longing—the particulars of Judaism and feminism, parenting and partying, small-town life and big blundering dreams, as well as the timeless question: How do we carry on?

Lech

Literary

Tortoise Books

Review\n** Starred Review ** from Publishers Weekly: "Lippmann packs a great deal into a single turn of phrase, balancing vulnerability and humor with luminescent prose. The compression and bursts of poignancy will remind readers of Kathy Fish and Amy Hempel."\n"I loved it. Efficient, daring and fearless--Sara Lippmann aims right for the heart of our confused desire. She gets us inside the female experience, not just of lust but of the tedium and resentment, the long grind that lurks beneath the slow burn." - Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World\n"Sara Lippmann has a major talent; she can create a whole world in five pages or less. The stories in JERKS are funny and vibrant and heartbreakingly real." 
- Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice\n"Sara Lippmann is a master of the absurd realities that comprise our American domestic lives. The stories in JERKS crackles with urgent, electric prose that sets fire to every sentence on every page. Funny, daring, brutal, honest, brilliant. Lippmann is dazzling," 
- Robert Lopez, author of A Better Class of People\n"Sara Lippmann is the shit. JERKS is all killer, no filler. Vividly funny, full of heart, devastating. They should carve this book onto the side of a mountain." 
- Bud Smith, author of Teenager\n"Reading JERKS is as satisfying as misbehaving yourself. Lippmann's collection is a fearless study of our most carnal desires and what we'll do to experience them fully. Taut and expansive, funny and merciless, this is an electric collection you won't soon forget." 
-Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk: Stories\n"With her effortless dry humor and swift prose, Lippmann leads us to the field where our desires rage like wildfire, and keeps us there long enough to witness small kindling of hope in the fire's aftermath." - Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm\n"With lyricism and stinging humor, Lippmann brings us characters who are utterly lost and yet somehow hopeful, both compassionate and deeply cruel, and above all, painfully real." 
- Karen Pittelman, poet/singer/songwriter of Karen & The Sorrows\nThe surprise of a Lippmann story—be it within the line, in a character's interiority, or in the story as a whole—means that every story feels as though it is thrumming with life. There is a lovely tension that is created between the vibrancy of the stories and the lives of the characters within the stories. Even though the characters in Jerks are often stuck in their lives, that sense of life, of possibility, of creation, runs throughout the collection, uniting the stories as one." -- Plougshares\n"Lippmann tells expansive stories in such condensed form. In the heart and relatability of each story, we recognize our own fumbling desperations."-- Necessary Fiction\n"You probably won't love these characters, but you will see yourself in them" -- Chicago Review of Books\n"For as painful as the stories could be, I laughed or snorted in almost equal measure. I loved these stories for their flavor, for their mixture of escape and reality, and for their double punch of pleasure and pain." -- The Masters Review\nWith JERKS, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives--desire is a live wire, however frayed, a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth living. The messy characters in these eighteen stories may hack up their bed sheets with group sex, anonymous sex, sexual history, infidelity, and a literal handsaw, but there's tenderness, too, among the lust and rage. Even when fantasy offers a shortcut to oneself, without connection, it's a lonely escape. With crisp precision, ample honesty and desperate humor, Lippmann delivers an irresistibly fraught cast of characters at various stages of undress. 
Fiction. Women's Studies.

JERKS

Mason Jar Press

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Books by Lippmann, Sara

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lippmann, Sara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Doll Palace

Doll Palace

Lech

JERKS