Venus Drive: Stories - Softcover

Lipsyte, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312429606 ISBN 13: 9780312429607

Publisher: Picador, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive is tightly wound in more ways than one. Peopled by walking-wounded hipsters with crummy jobs, drug fiends in varied stages of addiction, and kids sent away to summer camp who act on their worst instincts, these sharply written short stories crackle with crafty, streetwise dialogue. Their first-person narratives place engaging, unstable people into seedy yet believable situations in a way that might remind the reader of Denis Johnson, Robert Stone, or Lynne Tillman. Perspectives vary from tale to tale, but these are characters engaged in compulsive pursuits who find themselves pushed to limits they didn't know they had. At his best, Lipsyte writes the way Miles Davis played trumpet--with a few lines, and some silence, he makes everything cohere. One of the gifts of this debut collection is its unsentimentality; the various vignettes come together to show us that "life on the edge" is uncannily similar to any other lifestyle choice. For some, fantasy and reality are just different channels on the same TV set. --Mike McGonigal

About the Author:

Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He has also written The Subject Steve and Home Land, winner of The Believer book award. He lives in Astoria, Queens.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312429606
• ISBN 13: 9780312429607
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176