Underground No More: An Interview with Sam Lipsyte
More than five years have passed since Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land confounded the publishing world. After being turned down by more than twenty U.S. imprints, the novel was finally published—to instant acclaim—in the U.K., and later released in this country as a paperback original (by Picador). Brilliantly constructed as a series of letters from the unforgettable Lewis “Teabag” Miner to his high-school alumni magazine, Home Land solidified Lipsyte’s burgeoning status as the funniest writer no one really knew…
The Great American Novel in Miniature: A Review of Benjamin Taylor’s The Book of Getting Even
Lurking beneath the dazzling political and pop-culture fireworks of Benjamin Taylor’s second novel, The Book of Getting Even, is a vivid tale of American displacement and discovery that could be called a contemporary classic but for one thing: It’s only 166 pages long. No Infinite Jest, this. No Underworld or The Corrections, no Fortress of Solitude or The Emperor’s Children. And yet it feels like an important American novel, epic in everything but size. Could this be part of a burgeoning trend?