The Subject Steve - Tapa blanda

‘Sam Lipsyte is a wickedly gifted writer.’ Robert Stone

"Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny. In a time when the language of most novels is dead on arrival, this
book, about a dying man, is startlingly alive." Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides

"I laughed out loud – and I never laugh out loud. You'll want to rest up before reading this one. And after. Thank you, Sam." Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club

‘Sam Lipsyte can get blood out of a stone... I gripped this book so hard my knuckles turned white.’ Edmund White

‘Lipsyte is certainly not without talent’ Norman Mailer

US praise for The Subject Steve:
‘A book about mortality is a risky prospect, but Lipsyte is very funny, and his stylistic high-wire act—a rowdy prose that is by turns shocking and lyrical—is equal to his daring premise.’ The New Yorker

‘Satire with a capital “S”, a DeLillo-like excavation of our consuming consumer culture, and the ultimate fear – the fear of death – that lurks beneath it... Lipsyte is the literary progeny of DeLillo, but also the younger brother of George Saunders or Chuck Palahniuk. Like these writers, Lipsyte displays an ambitious vision, a willingness to craft fiction that fearlessly provokes and probes. Lipsyte revels in language and wordplay, writing Beckett-influenced absurdist dialogue that regularly elicits laughs... Dark, lancing humour, first-rate satire and writing that dares to be bold and edgy.’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘A fusillade of language, a rapid-fire rant of slippery trickery that doesn’t let up until the last line. The end of one’s world pales in comparison to such wordplay.’ Entertainment Weekly

‘Brutally satirical ... In a world more like that of this novel, every card-carrying member of Oprah’s book-club empire would be forced at gunpoint to read The Subject Steve straight through... Even more than in his drug-addled, linguistically wired collection of short stories, Venus Drive, Lipsyte’s headlong narrative methods produce stunning payoffs: disorienting dialogue, hilarious black humour, brilliantly riffed arias and parables spun out of thin air. But Lipsyte is more than a hip stylist of the bleak, and many passages beg to be quoted in full.’ Village Voice

A dark, savagely funny and wholly original satire of, er, everything.
‘A brilliant novel, in every conceivable way.’ TOBY LITT

"The bad news was bad. I was dying. I was dying of something no one had ever died of before. I was dying of something absolutely, fantastically new."

Steve, the eponymous antihero of Sam Lipsyte's savagely funny first novel is a mild 37-year-old who is diagnosed with a new disease, a disease so rare that no-one has ever died of it before. It seems that this perfectly ordinary postmodern citizen – divorced husband, absent father, midlife adman – is dying of something that might well be boredom. So, as any man whose death is foretold would, he embarks on a project of sexual indulgence, chronic wastefulness, spending sprees ($73k in three days) and half-hearted familial reconciliation. ('Don't threaten me.' is his ex-wife's response to the news.)

The news of his condition sparks a media frenzy and, desperate for an escape, Steve heads upstate to the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, founded and ruled by the shadowy Heinrich. But Steve soon realises that this somewhat disinterested attempt to find salvation, redemption, or just a cure has set him on a bizarre path from which death may be not a bad way out.

Sam Lipsyte's razor-sharp satire is utterly merciless, encompassing every aspect of American culture you could care to mention, and a few more things you'd never thought of. Sustaining his black humour over the course of this hugely readable novel, Lipsyte leaves the reader exhausted and in awe at the brilliance of his quick-fire mind.