Home Land

Description

Welcome to the most twisted high-school reunion imaginable, from a rising star of American satire. '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.

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

'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny' Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex 'Sam Lipsyte can really write. Sentence after sentence is clever, agile, amused; they torque away, at the last moment, from what you might expect. One-liners abound, often freighted with darkness and insight; 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.' Guardian 'Lipsyte's fictional voice is incredibly self-assured, as if the world had been retranslated.' Time Out 'Lipsyte's writing is inventive and playful ... Deviant and hilarious, an absurdist picaresque.' Literary Review