The Fun Parts: Stories

The Fun Parts is precisely the type of collection one would expect from the author of novels like The Ask, a biting satire about a disgruntled college fundraiser. Together, these 13 acid-tipped stories, many of which appeared in publications like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, paint a grimly funny view of contemporary American life.

Sam Lipsyte's stories often feature wildly improbable premises that seem completely plausible in his sure hands. In "The Wisdom of the Doulas," a hapless Mitchell Malloy, who "just sort of fell into this work while stalking my ex-girlfriend," tries to become the first male birth coach in his city. Several stories revolve around protagonists in some stage of drug addiction, but that affliction seems relatively benign, more a way station to some other status than a permanent sentence. The narrator of "The Worm in Philly," planning to write a children's book about the middleweight boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler, announces he "was no longer experimenting with drugs," because he "knew exactly what to do with them." Lipsyte shows he's adept at poking fun at the absurdity of trendy names like Ewen, Juanito, Medgar and Shalom, some of the children at a day-care center in "The Climber Room," a sometimes creepy look at a middle-aged man's infatuation with a younger woman.

There isn't a lot in Sam Lipsyte's stories that will make you optimistic about the future of humanity in this "world gone berserk with misery, plague, affinity marketing." But at least he will have you laughing all the way as we stumble toward the apocalypse. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

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