The Subject Steve

LIPSYTE, SAM

Flamingo

Welcome to the most twisted high-school reunion imaginable, from a rising star of American satire. 'It's confession time, fellow alumni. Ever since Principal Fontana found me and commenced to bless my mail slot, monthly, with the Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter, I've been meaning to pen my update. Sad to say, vanity slowed my hand. Let a fever for the truth speed it now. Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out.' The Eastern Valley High School alumni newsletter, 'Catamount Notes', is bursting with tales of success: we've got a bankable politician and a famous baseball star, not to mention a major label recording artist. And then there is the appalling, somewhat bitter and yet entirely loveable Lewis Miner, class of '89 -- who did not pan out. From perhaps the most gifted of the younger generation of US satirical novelists, 'Home Land' is a marvel of playful prose and sustained invention -- and very, very funny.

Home Land

Picador

Venus Drive

VENUS DRIVE

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

What if somebody finally wrote to his high school alumni bulletin and told...the truth! Here is an update from hell, a brilliant work from novelist Sam Lipsyte, whom Jeffrey Eugenides calls "original, devious, and very funny" and of whose first novel Chuck Palahniuk wrote, "I laughed out loud---and I never laugh out loud."
The Eastern Valley High School Alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes, is bursting with tales of success: former students include a bankable politician and a famous baseball star, not to mention a major-label recording artist. Then there is the appalling, yet utterly lovable, Lewis Miner, class of '89---a.k.a Teabag---who did not pan out. Home Land is his confession in all its bitter, lovelorn glory.

Home Land: A Novel

An intense, mordantly funny collection of short fiction from the author of Home Land and The Ask.
A man with an "old soul" finds himself at a Times Square peep show, looking for more than just a little action. A young man goes into some serious regression after finding his deceased mother's stash of morphine. A group of summer-camp sadists return to the scene of the crime. Sam Lipsyte's brutally funny narratives tread morally ambiguous terrain, where desperate characters stumble over hope, or sometimes merely stumble. Written with ferocious wit and surprising empathy, Venus Drive is a potent collection of stories from "a wickedly gifted writer" (Robert Stone).
The Picador paperback edition includes an excerpt from The Ask.

Venus Drive: Stories

United States

Meet Steve (not his real name), a Special Case, in truth a Terminal Case, and the eponymous antihero of Sam Lipsyte's first novel. Steve has been informed by two doctors that he is dying of a condition of unquestioned fatality, with no discernible physical cause. Eager for fame, and to brand the new plague, they dub it Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, or PREXIS for short. Turns out, though, Steve's just dying of boredom. The Subject Steve is a dazzling debut―by turns manic, ebullient, and exquisitely deadpan―Sam Lipsyte is in company with the master American satirists.

The Subject Steve: A Novel

A searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel by a young American master
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has "not been developing": after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor―a major "ask"―who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the "give" won't come cheap. 
Probing many themes― or, perhaps, anxieties―including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is a burst of genius by an author who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The Ask: A Novel

A hilarious collection of stories from the writer The New York Times called "the novelist of his generation"
Returning to the form in which he began, Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times bestseller The Ask, offers up The Fun Parts, a book of bold, hilarious, and deeply felt fiction. A boy eats his way to self-discovery while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. Meanwhile, an aerobics instructor, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the stories, some first published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, or Playboy, that unfold in Lipsyte's richly imagined world. Other tales feature a grizzled and possibly deranged male birth doula, a doomsday hustler about to face the multi-universal truth of "the real-ass jumbo," and a tawdry glimpse of the northern New Jersey high school shot-putting circuit, circa 1986. Combining both the tragicomic dazzle of his beloved novels and the compressed vitality of his classic debut collection, The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his best―an exploration of new voices and vistas from a writer Time magazine has said "everyone should read."

The Fun Parts: Stories

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The bad news was bad. I was dying. I was dying of something no one had ever died of before. I was dying of something absolutely, fantastically new. The Subject Steve is a dark, dazzling, and totally original satire on human mortality and our desperate efforts to evade it. Meet Steve (not his real name), a Special Case, in truth a Terminal Case, and the eponymous antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s savagely funny first novel. Steve has been informed by his two doctors, the Philosopher and the Mechanic, that he is dying of a condition of unquestioned fatality but no discernible physical cause. Eager to brand a new plague with their names, they call it Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, or PREXIS for short. The news that this perfectly ordinary postmodern citizen–bitter ex-husband, quasi-deadbeat father, midlife adman, creator of such resonant dot.com slogans as “Reality Is for Those Who Dream” and “How Did You Like Tomorrow?”–is dying of something that might well be boredom sets off a media frenzy. When his physicians are exposed as frauds, but not his death sentence, he betakes himself upstate to the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, founded and ruled by the shadowy and brutal caregiver Heinrich of Newark. From there he will travel to the desert, where the success of a cultish media empire will rest on his demise. But nothing will alter the Subject Steve’s inevitable rendezvous with those twin banes of humankind, death and synergy. With the publication of this novel, by turns manic, ebullient and exquisitely deadpan, Sam Lipsyte enters the company of the master American satirists. It is a dark comedy for overlit times.

Genre Fiction

Broadway

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

Books by LIPSYTE, SAM

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

The Subject Steve

Home Land

VENUS DRIVE

Home Land: A Novel

Venus Drive: Stories

The Subject Steve: A Novel

The Ask: A Novel

The Fun Parts: Stories

The Ask: A Novel

The Subject Steve