Venus Drive

From the peep palaces of Times Square to the cubicles of corporate America, Sam Lipsyte's stories comprise a chorus of gallows humor and good will gone bad. There's Gary, failed punk icon turned petty drug dealer and ameteur self-actualization guru, and the Chersky girl, who makes a strange midnight discovery roller skating through a morgue. Pot-dazed Trotskyites, summer-camp sadists, and morally ambiguous babysitters also make themselves known in the lost, shattered landscapes of Venus Drive. In these visceral, sharp-witted tales, Lipsyte serves up a modern buffet of hope, lust, and loss. And Sam was in the rocking Dungbeetle.