Home Land - Hardcover

Sam Lipsyte

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000717036X ISBN 13: 9780007170364

Publisher: Flamingo, 2004

Synopsis

Welcome to the most twisted high-school reunion imaginable, from a rising star of American satire. 'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny.' Jeffrey Eugenides, author of 'Middlesex' '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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Genius. As eloquent and delirious a rant I've heard since Henry Miller was doing the ranting. Sam Lipsyte has the best male gaze in town and when he turns that gaze inwards I start to understand how we got to be where we are today, as a country and as a people."
---Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook

What if somebody finally wrote to his high school alumni bulletin and told...the truth! Here is an update from hell, and the most brilliant work to date, by the novelist 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. This is his confession in all its bitter, lovelorn glory.

"Lipsyte's vision of our collective existence is so accurately skewed, there is no escaping the delirious---and beautifully disturbing---shock of recognition. Writing this deep is rare enough---writing this deep and this hysterical pretty much didn't exist until Lipsyte began pouring it onto the page."--Jerry Stahl, author of I, Fatty
"Lipsyte is playful and lewd, bleak and farcical, walking a fine line between near-glib humour and a genuine existential fear one could even call Beckettian. . . . Sam Lipsyte can really write."--Aida Edamariam, The Guardian
"Sam Lipsyte has got balls the size of watermelons. He's ripped the piss out of his Yank countrymen so much that he gets published here in the UK first. He's one wicked sod. You'll love it."--Lads

Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and the novel The Subject Steve. He lives in Astoria, Queens.

About the Author:

Sam Lipsyte is the author of 'Venus Drive', a collection of short stories, and two novels, 'The Subject Steve' and 'Home Land'. His work has appeared in the New York Times and the Quarterly. He was born in 1968, and got married in 2003.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 000717036X
• ISBN 13: 9780007170364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400