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OPEN CITY BOOKS
| Venus
Drive by Sam Lipsyte |
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HOMEK |
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From the peep palaces of Times Square to the cubicles of corporate America, Sam Lipsyte’s stories comprise a chorus of gallows humor and good will gone bad. There’s Gary, failed punk icon turned petty drug dealer and amateur self-actualization guru, and the Chersky girl, who makes a strange midnight discovery roller-skating through a morgue. Pot-dazed Trotskyites, summer-camp sadists, and morally-ambiguous babysitters also make themselves known in the lost, shattered landscapes of Venus Drive. In these visceral, sharp-witted tales, Lipsyte serves up a modern buffet of hope, lust, and loss.
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Sam Lipsyte was born in New York City in 1968 and grew up in New Jersey. He is a former senior editor of Feed, and the former frontman for the noise rock band, Dungbeetle. His writing has appeared in The Quarterly, 5_Trope, Nerve, Aedon, Mother Jones, Spin, and Open City Magazine. His novel The Subject Steve, was published by Broadway Books in September 2001, and his novel Home Land, was published by Picador in January 2005. author photo: Michael Galinsky |
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Praise for Venus Drive: "Not
for the faint of heart (or soul), Venus
Drive explores the complexity of despair with poignancy
and sly wit." "Sam
Lipsyte’s sentences burn with the reckless and gaudy flame of homemade
pyrotechnics, arcing up and up beyond the backyards, carports, tract
homes, ailing parents, and disenchanted children of boilerplate suburbia
to the far horizon of the literary landscape . . . Redemption takes
only one form—language—and in that, Lipsyte summons grace
and beauty from the strangest places in the human subdivision." "Lipsyte
captures flashes of his characters' addled humanity and smashes a window
into their hopelessness . . . It's fascinating to read a writer who
can bring you so efficiently to such uncomfortable places." "Lipsyte’s
verbiage packs a punch, and his syntax is as tight as Madonna’s
corset." "Sam
Lipsyte is a wickedly gifted writer. Venus Drive is filled with
grimly satisfying fractured insights and hardcore humor. But it also
displays some inspired sympathy for the daze and confusion of its characters.
Above all it's wonderfully written and compulsively readable with brilliant
and funny dialog, a collection that represents the emergence of a very
strong talent." "Sam
Lipsyte can get blood out of a stone—rich, red human blood from
the stony sterility of contemporary life. His writing is gripping—at
least I gripped this book so hard my knuckles turned white." "These
are torqued-up, enthusiastically black-hearted stories by a grimly cheerful
author. And the damned things are queerly rather loving and lovely as
well. Bukowski meets Paley." "I
like it when short stories—metaphorically speaking, of course—smack
me in the face, kind of like what Kafka said about art being like an
axe. And so that’s what Sam Lipsyte’s stories do—they
come at you like a fist, they knock you around, they make you wince,
they make you look away, and then they make you look back." "The
new world as viewed by the newest." "It’s
a dark thrill to tap into the sensibility of Sam Lipsyte’s remarkable
stories. Not only does he write with comic-tragic brilliance, he knows
something terribly important about the zeitgeist. Venus Drive
is a dazzling debut." "You
know what I did when I was your age? I kept trying to be the first person
on my block to be able to say I had just read so-and-so. Can you believe
it? All I wanted was to hurry up and spot an emerging writer, somebody
nobody else sounded anything like. Pretty nutty, you bet, but it turned
out to make a life for me, which is a lot more than I can say for some
of the other stunts I was pulling when I was your age. Wise up. Try
out Lipsyte. Walk around with his stories. See if they look good on
you. Drop the name. Say Lipsyte. The gang of them, they’ll stare
and say who, who? Which is where you’ll already be so far ahead
of the game, it won’t even be funny, will it? Now tell me who ever
gave you better advice. And what’s it going to cost you? Please.
I’m handing you a way of being, or at least a way of seeming to
be, for the price of one stinking lousy one-of-a-kind book." "Sam
Lipsyte’s stories are short and not so sweet: more like a dash
of salt water in the face of life this minute, as if to say ‘Wake
up, friend, let’s get crazy!’ And the getting is excellent." "These
are terrible people doing terrible things! There must be something redeeming
about them, right? What I know is that Sam Lipsyte can write: he juices
the American language into some lyrical, terrifying pulp. Drink it up
if you dare. His stuff is so scary, it’s good." "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."
Venus
Drive, ISBN 1-890447-25-0
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