The Fun Parts: Stories
Written by Sam Lipsyte
Narrated by Sam Lipsyte, Peter Berkrot, Deanna Hurst and Michael Page
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
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Reviews for The Fun Parts
47 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sam Lipsyte may not be for everyone, but if you get into his lunacy, then you will really like these stories. His books deal with people on the edge and he has this great combination of humor and pathos. Very creative. His novel "The Ask" should be your introduction him. A good author to try.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A begrudging four stars. Lots of fun to read, but weirdly insubstantial--couldn't remember a thing about it two days after I finished. A kind of brilliant distillation of contemporary fiction: smart, funny, fast, fatally ironic, cute, pathetic, unthreatening, sleek, slick, facile, assembled from clever components.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found the stories in this book to be compulsive reads. The narrative is driven, the characters are nuanced, and the dialog is "bangin".
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I devoured this book, I had to stay up and finish it because I just could not put it down. Each story captured my attention, and had me feeling all these...*feelings*. You know its good writing when the author can have you laughing out loud one moment and then furrowing your brow in the seriousness of the turn of events. Just absolutely rich, gooey, intoxicating writing. Yum.