The Ask

A searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel by a young American master

Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has not been developing: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor--a major ask--who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the give won't come cheap.

Probing many themes-- or, perhaps, anxieties--including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is a burst of genius by an author who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Author: Sam Lipsyte
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 03/01/2011
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.58w x 0.89d
ISBN13: 9780312680633
ISBN10: 0312680635
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Humorous | General
- Fiction | World Literature | American | 21st Century

About the Author

Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and the novels The Subject Steve and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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