The Fun Parts, Sam Lipsyte
The Fun Parts, Sam Lipsyte
List: $35.99 | Sale: $25.20
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The Fun Parts
Stories

Author: Sam Lipsyte

Narrator: Sam Lipsyte, Peter Berkrot, Deanna Hurst, Michael Page

Unabridged: 6 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/05/2013

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories

Synopsis

A writer Time magazine has said “everybody should read,” Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times bestselling 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. In another story, 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 tales, some first published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Playboy, that unfold in Lipsyte’s richly imagined world.Other stories feature a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a dooms-day 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, Venus Drive, The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his best—an exploration of new voices and vistas in the form with which he began.

About Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by christa on February 19, 2013

I’m testing a theory that where you fall on the Lipsyte-ometer can be determined by what this passage does to the reading parts of your brain -- specifically the last sentence: “Ypsilanti was easy to leave. I wasn’t from there. I’d just landed there. The Michigan Eviscerations had begun in Manhattan......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on February 22, 2013

I find it strange that whenever I read story collections that include pieces originally published in the New Yorker, I can usually tell. I found the NYer stories in The Fun Parts are actually the least fun of the bunch. And I feel the same way with George Saunders NYer stories most of the time too.......more

Goodreads review by Emily on February 21, 2013

This is a generous three stars. Do I think Sam Lipsyte is a good writer? I do. Do I think this collection is representative of his full capabilities? I absolutely don't. For the most part in The Fun Parts, Sam takes people with problems (self-image or socially stemming ones, work-related gripes, or......more

Goodreads review by Tuck on April 26, 2013

billed at hilarious, struck me rather as hysterical and cynical. perhaps it's a nyc thing? good stories though, with lots of rich detail and character and plot packed into 10 or so pages. here is a tiny bit from opening of "the republic of empathy" ".................... But Peg really wanted another b......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on April 06, 2013

pg. 101: "...[W]e earn our fee on the second day... Yesterday the Gottwalds were the stunned and grateful progenitors of a mewling miracle. Today [they] are the smug bastards they've probably always been. and the Gottwald baby, well, he, might be only two days old, but I can already predict he's goi......more

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