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More copies of this ISBNHome Landby Sam Lipsyte
Awards
Staff Pick
A caustic and hilarious story about Lewis Miner, a man afflicted by a terrible high school experience and blessed with an acid tongue that takes no prisoners. Lipsyte's sentences are creations of absolute wonder and terrific angst. Review-A-Day"Lipsyte writes the way you wish you could talk. He's smart without pretense. He's funny when the situation most calls for tears. And in Miner, he's found the guy who sat in the back of your English class who you suspected was either really stoned or really brilliant. It turns out that he's both....Home Land is the kind of book that gets passed around, underlined, dog-eared. It's the kind of book you give to the guy who says he doesn't like books." Benjamin Alsup, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"Former Feed editor Lipsyte was one of the young writers to come out of Open City's initial rise in the '90s; his collection of short stories was followed by 2001's The Subject Steve, a kind of condensed Infinite Jest. This second novel is written as a series of insanely baroque, inappropriately intimate letters to a high school alumni newsletter, 20 or so years after graduation. The letters' fictional author, Lewis Miner, aka 'Teabag,' is clearly lucid enough to know that the letters could never be printed, let alone appreciated by what emerge as his philistine fellow graduates, but he persists anyway. That giddy, passing-itself-off-as-ordinary persistence becomes the point of the novel, which presents lives that continue in the face of crushing, banal and heartbreaking failures. Lewis can barely make his rent payments, is employed writing 'FakeFacts' for a cola outfit and is recovering from his fiance's recent departure. He and his clique of Eastern Valley High leftovers cope as best they can, taunting and analyzing one another unceasingly. The novel climaxes, if it can be called that, at a surreal gathering of former classmates dubbed a Togethering. At every turn, Lipsyte plays on the clichs of the stuck-white-aging-male, though he embellishes them with sharp dialogue. That the novel is an unpleasant, static read is a sign of its uncompromising, mise-en-abyme success. Agent, Ira Silverberg at Donadio & Olsen. (Jan. 3)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:"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
Review:"More marijuana moonbeams from reefer-brained Lipsyte....Many who enter will soon find themselves tripping over phrases and sentences so dishearteningly opaque that deconstructing the narrator's glancing shots at originality will become too tiring to bear." Kirkus Reviews
Review:"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
Review:"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
Review:"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 (U.K.)
Review:"[A]s Lipsyte pointedly shows, Miner is less a loser than an avatar of failure, a high priest of defects. What he truly wants is to enlighten those of us who have yet to acknowledge our own flaws — in other words, almost everybody." Lizzie Skurnick, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis: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. Synopsis: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. 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. Winner of the First Annual Believer Book Award Nominated for Nerve magazine's Henry Miller Award A New York Times Notable Book 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." 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 loveable, Lewis Miner, class of '89—a.k.a. Teabag—who did not pan out. Home Land is Teabag's confession in all its bitter, lovelorn, unforgettable glory. Winner of the First Annual Believer Book Award "[Home Land is] funny and sad and cruel and awful. It makes David Sedaris seem a little lightweight. It makes David Foster Wallace seem a little out of touch. It makes Rick Moody seem, well, unnecessarily Moody. It makes one laugh out loud while pondering all the ways in which all lives, invariably, go wrong . . . Lipsyte writes the way you wish you could talk. He's smart without pretense.He's funny when the situation most calls for tears . . . Home Land is the kind of book that gets passed around, underlined, dog-eared. It's the kind of book you give to the guy who says he doesn't like books."—Esquire "Written as a series of unembroidered letters . . . Home Land is an energetic campaign against the art of the sunny update. This [novel] has an obvious forebear in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Like Portnoy, [our protagonist] Miner piles clausal filigree upon clausal filigree to create a baroque edifice of seething irony . . . Home Land is not simply an account of life at the bottom of the food chain; Miner is too interesting a loser—in the face of his vast inconsequence, he remains unbowed."—Lizzie Skurnick, The New York Times Book Review "Long adored for pitch-perfect short stories about melancsyte hit full comic stride with Home Land. Lipsyte's that rarest of writers: lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny."—New York Magazine "[Home Land is] funny and sad and cruel and awful. It makes David Sedaris seem a little lightweight. It makes David Foster Wallace seem a little out of touch. It makes Rick Moody seem, well, unnecessarily Moody. It makes one laugh out loud while pondering all the ways in which all lives, invariably, go wrong . . . Lipsyte writes the way you wish you could talk. He's smart without pretense. He's funny when the situation most calls for tears. And in Miner, he's found the guy who sat in the back of your English class who you suspected was really stoned or really brilliant. It turns out that he's both . . . Home Land is the kind of book that gets passed around, underlined, dog-eared. It's the kind of book you give to the guy who says he doesn't like books."—Esquire "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 "Genius. As eloquent and delirious a rant I've ever heard since Henry Miller . . . 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 "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 "Comic genius on every page. Lewis Miner speaks truth to power, part Lenny Bruce, part Leon Trotsky, with tiny hints of John Belushi and Camus in there, too. Holden Caulfield, fading poster boy for pissed-off alienated youth, comes to mind, not by way of comparison, but rather because Home Land would be his bible."—Thomas Beller "A biting satire on the confused aspirations and ideals of American youth. Sam Lipsyte eulogizes the quiet disappointments of yesteryear's high school graduates through the voice of his anti-hero, Lewis Miner, a kind of Holden Caulfield for Generation X."—Marco Notarianni, The Times Literary Supplement "Playful, serious as a death mask, inventive, filthy, and gifted as can be. [Lipsyte] takes on contemporary reality and gives it one hell of a fight . . . A despairing riot of laughs. Read it now."—Chris Roberts, Uncut "A profoundly funny comic novel."—David Belcher, The Glasgow Herald "I have no idea whether this is the way people talk, but I suspect it is, and that I've learned something. In any case, I was impressed, amused, and—since blurb writers like to list things in threes—moved by the events in Home Land. This Catamount really listened up."—Ann Beattie About the AuthorSam 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.
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