The Fun Parts

Reviews / Votes

[A] sour and scintillating new collection of short stories... The dialogue constantly sparkles and unsettles, with strange seismic shifts going on beneath the surface of the prose. You won't read finer sentences this year -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * An idiosyncratic, hyperactively rendered collection where words and ideas collide to dazzling effect... dementedly imaginative... Sharp and deeply, blackly funny * Metro * Sublime mayhem! Lipsyte expertly works the line between hilarity and pathos... Revelation, wisdom, inner peace - they come hard in Lipsyte's world, if they come at all, which doesn't keep these stories from being a hoot... He delivers plenty of funk, spunk and fizz -- Ben Fountain * New York Times * Lipsyte shows himself to be perfectly in control of, and apparently unintimidated by, his own brilliance... Inventive, daring, and wildly funny -- Rozalind Dineen * TLS * A brilliantly funny writer... Lipsyte's writing is so biting, so inventive, you find yourself rereading whole paragraphs for the pleasure of it -- Tom Fleming * Literary Review * Lipsyte specialises in dark, scabrous stories that are nearly always horribly, excruciatingly funny -- Louis Wise * Sunday Times * Lipsyte's understanding of modern spite, rage and self-destruction is peerless... Brilliant -- William Leith * Financial Times * Supersaturated with humor, depth, acuity, pain, a warped sense of grace, and the rolling thunder of Lipsyte's matchless prose -- Books of the Year * Vice * Lipsyte is a precise and perceptive observer, capable of impaling a lifestyle with one sparse aside -- Tim Lewis * Guardian * He is a detail fiend, a maximalist who possesses an expansive linguistic imagination that can satisfy his leanings... [In The Fun Parts] you'll encounter a writer's vision that is slant but acute -- Kevin Barry * Guardian * Lipsyte has built his career writing pitch-black comedies... His stories can be wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad, sometimes in the same sentence * Wall Street Journal * Lipsyte blends the humorous and the heartfelt, the riotous and the despairing * New Yorker * Fierce satire mingles with warmth and pathos as Lipsyte showcases his knack for stylistic variety and tangles with the thorny human experiences of moving beyond one's past or shedding one's personal baggage... Lipsyte's biting humor suffuses the collection, but it's his ability to control the relative darkness of each moment that makes the stories so engrossing * Publishers' Weekly (starred review) * The Fun Parts showcases stories whose sheer telling-their force; their rhythmic momentum-tends to matter more than what they tell of... Lipsyte's stories exhibit a near-geometrical elegance. They're fun; they hurt; they have fun with hurt; but under it all is the sound of silk spinning and quickening, arcing from nothing to nothing-or the sight of an iron moon in mid-flight... The everyday is replayed as poetry -- David Winters * The Quarterly Conversation * It has that grim magic, [it] conjures up a world both forgotten and new and teaches the reader something essential -- Jim Ruland * San Diego City Beat * Whether Lipsyte's prose is brutally simple or self-parodyingly ostentatious, it is always clear as vodka in its contempt for the human race * Sunday Telegraph * Cute, spry and bizarre... funny -- Tom Macaulay * Sunday Times * Clever enough to pack his tales with a profusion of funny lines, Lipsyte's humane view of the world steers him away from the glibness that would have made this book far less palatable -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald * He spins out his lines at a breakneck clip, the riffs come thick and fast, and the gags are sprayed on with a machine gun... a whole lot of fun -- Kevin Barry * Guardian * Undeniably clever, and linguistically inventive * Independent on Sunday * A horrible world beautifully pinned down -- William Leith * Scotsman * Subversive and funny and full of heart -- Tom Barbash * Independent Magazine *