Search - List of Books by Sam Lipsyte

• Venus Drive, Open City Books, 2000, ISBN 9781890447250
• The Subject Steve, Broadway Books, 2001, ISBN 9780767908856; reprint Random House, Inc., 2002, ISBN 9780767909174
• Home Land, Flamingo, 2004, ISBN 9780007170364; Macmillan, 2005, ISBN 9780312424183
• The Ask, Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 9780374298913

Anthologies

• "Dear Miss Primatologist Lady", Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondence from the Edge of Modern Romance, Editors Rosalind Porter, Joshua Knelman, Simon and Schuster, 2008, ISBN 9781416569732
• "April Fool's Day", The revolution will be accessorized: BlackBook presents dispatches from the new counterculture, Editor Aaron Hicklin, HarperCollins, 2006, ISBN 9780060847326

The test for the obsessive prose stylist who lacks an instinctive gift for storytelling is always the same: what's the minimum amount of plot you can get away with and still function within the parameters of a novel? Basically, the more style you have, the less plot you need. So if it takes little time to sketch the plot of Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, that's a backhanded way of saying it's a stylistic tour de force.

On the strength of three previous novels, Lipsyte has fashioned himself as America's bard of highly educated disgruntlement. Like Joseph Heller in "Catch-22," this puppeteer of delusional creatures communicates despair through rapid-fire dialogue, several varieties of non sequitur and cleverly coiled punch lines. "Home Land" is unforgettably structured as a profane collection of rants delivered to the protagonist's high school alumni newsletter. "The Ask" is a far more ambitious social comedy, couched in an economic anxiety that threatens grand-scale emasculation.

Sam Lipsyte’s third novel, “The Ask,” is a dark and jaded beast ... the sort of book that, if it were an animal, would be a lumbering, hairy, crypto­zoological ape-man with a near-crippling case of elephantiasis.