Venus Drive [Paperback]

Sam Lipsyte (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2002

A funny, sad, off-kilter collection of stories from a rising American star of satire. 'People like to call them ashes but it feels more like a couple of rocks, especially if you hold the whole thing in your hands, or swing it, as I do, on occasion, bolo-style from the sack cord. I'm still not sure why I do this, but it feels good, standing there in the dining room, windmilling my mother around.' From the peep palaces of Times Square to the cubicles of corporate America, 'Venus Drive' takes us away from the toothpaste-white gleam of American life, and leads us down an altogether darker, comic road on the seedy side of town. Pot-dazed revolutionaries, summer-camp sadists, and babysitters with an eye for erotic humiliation all make themselves known in this crafty, streetwise new collection from the acclaimed author of 'The Subject Steve'. At once shocking, inventive and funny, these stories confirm Sam Lipsyte's place amongst the very brightest -- and darkest -- talents of American fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive is tightly wound in more ways than one. Peopled by walking-wounded hipsters with crummy jobs, drug fiends in varied stages of addiction, and kids sent away to summer camp who act on their worst instincts, 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. Perspectives vary from tale to tale, but these are characters engaged in compulsive pursuits who find themselves pushed to limits they didn't know they had. At his best, Lipsyte writes the way Miles Davis played trumpet--with a few lines, and some silence, he makes everything cohere. One of the gifts of this debut collection is its unsentimentality; the various vignettes come together to show us that "life on the edge" is uncannily similar to any other lifestyle choice. For some, fantasy and reality are just different channels on the same TV set. --Mike McGonigal --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lipsyte's first short story collection gathers together 13 ferocious, truncated sketches, parading before the reader various semi-addicts, telemarketers and others suffering a terminal disconnect between their skills and their status. Not that Lipsyte's characters are going to choose the traditional American way out of their economic impasse, i.e., some mixture of sycophancy and labor. Disconnection, here, is style. Lipsyte's winners tend to achieve ephemeral glory as punk rockers or e-zine magnates before burning out. The narrator of "My Life, for Promotional Use Only" is a worn-out postpunk legend now working for his ex-girlfriend, Rosalie, in an office where everyone is eager to advance. "The people I work with are human r?sum?s. They are fluent in every computer language, boast degrees in marketing and medieval song. They snowboard on everything but snow. They study esoteric forms of South American combat and go on all-deer diets." The '90s prosperity is perceived as an alien excrescence. From "Admiral of the Swiss Navy" or "The Drury Girl," where the dark view of suburban childhoods predominates, to "Old Soul," the first story, about the narrator's sister's death from cancer, these people take the world much too seriously and yet risk things much too lightly. In "Beautiful Game," Gary is out on parole for possession; though he makes a living selling coke, he was actually arrested for trying to stop a cop from beating a street vendor. His mother wants him to meet a girl she's invited to a party. This almost invisible plot suggests a world of attitude. Gary, for instance, who is obviously wasting his life, won't waste an O'Douls because "it'd be wrong." Such collateral ironies make these stories simultaneously funny and disheartening. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo (December 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007133677
• ISBN-13: 978-0007133673
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,682,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, a collection of short stories to be published by Flamingo in Dec 2002. His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Quarterly. He was born in 1968 and lives in New York City. This is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If, writin' is fightin', this book is a knockout-, June 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Venus Drive (Paperback)

Sam Lipsyte writes very funny stories about very painful things. This is a *forceful* book - Lipsyte's characters are gripped and ripped by forces the writer brings alive with language that describes things words can barely contain: an apartment building full of old women waiting for death; a summer camp that mirrors, in mysterious ways, the cruel workings of concentration camps; a tele-marketer's face-off with loneliness... The subject matter can be shocking, and is often quite dark; the book is full of death, drugs, and abandoned dreams. Here's a passage from "My Life, For Promotional Use Only," in which a failed rocker turned dot-commer describes his new life:

"Once in a while, though, in the elevator at work, someone will stop me, a man my age with a cell phone, a portfolio case. He will ask me if I am who I am, recall with wonder something I did on stage with safety razors, mayonnaise. Maybe it's some dim gift I've given him, some phony idea that he's reached into danger long enough for one life. Now he can make some calls, do some deals. But neither of us knows what danger is. Neither of us is sinking fast through lake weeds."

But it's worth repeating that these stories, which reveal life with an honesty you'll see in few first-time collections, are often hilarious. Far from the fast (or slow) sink so much of today's fiction has become, this book - free of parlor tricks and cheap sentimentality, and full of small, hard, truths - is the triumphant surfacing of a fresh, and glorious, new voice.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable debut, May 15, 2000

By 

Jason McBride (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venus Drive (Paperback)

Sharp, taut, seriously funny and tremendously sad. Comparable in many ways to Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, but with greater range. A beautiful book that I just can't stop reading and re-reading.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slackers not slacking but fighting hard, August 23, 2006

By 

Patrick O'Henry "The Hippest Cup of Coffee in... (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venus Drive (Paperback)

Venus Drive might be a street or it might be an admonition to a woman in the getaway car after a bank robbery, but this book is one long riff on how folks get by. Not so much in how they get and spend their money, but in how they spend their lives. Life is currancy, and these people are flush.

If you like your books hot and twisted, read Rabid: A Novel by Kenyon, Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Johnson, The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Jones, and Fight Club: A Novel by Palahniuk.

The Bookeater!