Sam Lipsyte has always been a funny, engrossing writer, but with this latest novel the author of Home Land, Venus Drive and The Subject Steve is staking his claim as the city's singular source for mordant laughter.
The Ask is the story of Milo Burke, a more-or-less employed development officer at a small university whose further solvency depends on his wooing of one major, mysterious donor. The book discusses, with varying levels of terror, "work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire." Sam will be here to discuss the book with his celebrated editor at FSG, Lorin Stein.
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Staff Picks
Buddhism for Mothers
Written by Allison
By Sarah Napthali (Allen & Unwin, $15.95)
What a relief this book has been. As a brand-new mom with a full-time job, I've stumbled through days raw-eyed and manic. Each emotion, be it exquisite or horrendous, threatens to send me to the brink...and then, of course, I remember! Buddhism and breath. This book taught a frantic mommy just how to sit in the moment, no matter what that moment might be, and to absorb every second of my blessed new life with this astounding creature I call my son.
Lit
Written by Cheryl
By Mary Karr (Harper, $25.99)
Karr is one of our great memoirists. Her groundbreaking The Liars Club recounted her hardscrabble childhood on the Texas prairie where she tried to survive her alcoholic dagger-wielding mother's unpredictable behavior and Cherry, a subtle, often-overlooked chronicle of her own druggy adolescence marked by sexual exploration and an atypical rebellion against the restraints of negative expectations. Her bone-wrenching, gut-stirring, outloud-laughing style is on view in Lit which tells the story of how she became a poet, a wife, a mother and a raving alcoholic in that order, and how she saved herself with the loving help of friends, mentors and divine surrender. I could do without the conversion chapters, but until then, this memoir sets the standard for what has come before and what will follow.
The Beauty Myth
Written by Caroline
By Naomi Wolf (Harper, $14.99)
This book is probably the only socially relevant discussion of our perceptions of beauty since Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I am so sick of the "girl power!" variety of quasi-feminism that gets flouted in lipstick and underwear all over magazines and delivers only further anxiety-filled buying sprees, and also the ridiculous "anthropological" theories that Desmond Morris company use to attempt to justify current beauty standards. Thank goodness there are writers out there like Wolf who attempt to dissect the problem from every angle so we can understand why women, and, now increasingly, men, feel pressured to make physical, emotional and economic sacrifices in order to stay young and beautiful forever.
What a relief this book has been. As a brand-new mom with a full-time job, I've stumbled through days raw-eyed and manic. Each emotion, be it exquisite or horrendous, threatens to send me to the brink...and then, of course, I remember! Buddhism and breath. This book taught a frantic mommy just how to sit in the moment, no matter what that moment might be, and to absorb every second of my blessed new life with this astounding creature I call my son.
Karr is one of our great memoirists. Her groundbreaking The Liars Club recounted her hardscrabble childhood on the Texas prairie where she tried to survive her alcoholic dagger-wielding mother's unpredictable behavior and Cherry, a subtle, often-overlooked chronicle of her own druggy adolescence marked by sexual exploration and an atypical rebellion against the restraints of negative expectations. Her bone-wrenching, gut-stirring, outloud-laughing style is on view in Lit which tells the story of how she became a poet, a wife, a mother and a raving alcoholic in that order, and how she saved herself with the loving help of friends, mentors and divine surrender. I could do without the conversion chapters, but until then, this memoir sets the standard for what has come before and what will follow.
This book is probably the only socially relevant discussion of our perceptions of beauty since Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I am so sick of the "girl power!" variety of quasi-feminism that gets flouted in lipstick and underwear all over magazines and delivers only further anxiety-filled buying sprees, and also the ridiculous "anthropological" theories that Desmond Morris company use to attempt to justify current beauty standards. Thank goodness there are writers out there like Wolf who attempt to dissect the problem from every angle so we can understand why women, and, now increasingly, men, feel pressured to make physical, emotional and economic sacrifices in order to stay young and beautiful forever.