Milo Burke -- husband to a 'touched-out' wife, father to a three-year-old son, fund-raising officer at a third-tier university -- has just joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed. As he grasps after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is contacted by Purdy Stuart, a wealthy, one-time university friend with a sinister agenda. It is the start of a hilarious and harrowing odyssey through several degrees of peculiarly 21st-century hell -- a journey recorded by Milo with the caustic eloquence that is his only means of defence. The Ask is the best book yet from one of America's finest comic writers, an author who can prompt Chuck Palahniuk to write: 'I laughed out loud -- and I never laugh out loud'. A critical sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, this is a ridiculously accomplished, ridiculously entertaining novel that sympathises even as it skewers.
- 3 books
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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