- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Old Street Publishing (4 Jun 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1906964408
- ISBN-13: 978-1906964405
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.4 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 264,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Ask
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'Incandescently written . . . You have to go back to Joseph Heller in his prime to find American comic writing this energised.'
Sunday Times
'Hysterically funny . . . The Ask is full of amazing swerves in diction, sudden ascents and plunging descents in register (in the space of a page, and often in a single sentence); it affords breathtaking views of the social landscape of 'late capitalism' . . . In this and other respects, the comparison that demands to be made is with Martin Amis's Money: there's a similar intensity and voltage to the language, the same vaulting confidence in the ability of the pyrotechnic monologue to fix a historical moment.'
Observer
'The first thing to say about The Ask is that it is -- that rare thing -- a proper comic novel . . . For Lipsyte, comedy isn't a colourful sprinkling of hundreds and thousands: it's the whole, hilarious, deliciously dark-sponged cake. Each sentence is neatly timed, each word deployed (or invented) with instinctive wit, marshalled into a brutally (and often filthily) accurate vision of white-skinned, white-collar, 21st-century living.'
The Times
'Very, very funny . . . if this is reminiscent of anything, it's Martin Amis at his 1980s apogee . . . This may not be the novel America wanted to get, but it's clearly the one it has been asking for.'
Guardian
'It's brilliant . . . I thoroughly recommend it'
Arthur Smith
'Scabrously, deliriously funny . . . Lipsyte's prose arrows fly with gloriously weird spin, tracing punch-drunk curlicues before hitting their marks or landing in some nearby alternate universe'
New York Review of Books
'It's customary for radically sardonic, corrosively funny writers to put in time as mere cult icons, but enough already: everybody should read Sam Lipsyte'
Time Magazine
'One of the most unapologetic voices of contemporary literature . . . Lipsyte mines the sexual frustration of Philip Roth, combines it with the paranoia of Don DeLillo and fills the space in between with a cast of characters as absurd and enigmatic as anything in a Thomas Pynchon novel'
New York Observer
'I laughed out loud - and I never laugh out loud'
Chuck Palahniuk
'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny'
Jeffrey Eugenides
'Screamingly funny'
Geoff Dyer
'This book is a success: not only the belly-laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure it describes...Read Lipsyte and rejoice'
New York Times
'The riffs on fatherhood, work, and sex in Sam Lipsyte's unsparingly comic novel The Ask explode like a string of firecrackers - so funny you might lose an eye'
Vanity Fair --*
Sunday Times
'Hysterically funny . . . The Ask is full of amazing swerves in diction, sudden ascents and plunging descents in register (in the space of a page, and often in a single sentence); it affords breathtaking views of the social landscape of 'late capitalism' . . . In this and other respects, the comparison that demands to be made is with Martin Amis's Money: there's a similar intensity and voltage to the language, the same vaulting confidence in the ability of the pyrotechnic monologue to fix a historical moment.'
Observer
'The first thing to say about The Ask is that it is -- that rare thing -- a proper comic novel . . . For Lipsyte, comedy isn't a colourful sprinkling of hundreds and thousands: it's the whole, hilarious, deliciously dark-sponged cake. Each sentence is neatly timed, each word deployed (or invented) with instinctive wit, marshalled into a brutally (and often filthily) accurate vision of white-skinned, white-collar, 21st-century living.'
The Times
'Very, very funny . . . if this is reminiscent of anything, it's Martin Amis at his 1980s apogee . . . This may not be the novel America wanted to get, but it's clearly the one it has been asking for.'
Guardian
'It's brilliant . . . I thoroughly recommend it'
Arthur Smith
'Scabrously, deliriously funny . . . Lipsyte's prose arrows fly with gloriously weird spin, tracing punch-drunk curlicues before hitting their marks or landing in some nearby alternate universe'
New York Review of Books
'It's customary for radically sardonic, corrosively funny writers to put in time as mere cult icons, but enough already: everybody should read Sam Lipsyte'
Time Magazine
'One of the most unapologetic voices of contemporary literature . . . Lipsyte mines the sexual frustration of Philip Roth, combines it with the paranoia of Don DeLillo and fills the space in between with a cast of characters as absurd and enigmatic as anything in a Thomas Pynchon novel'
New York Observer
'I laughed out loud - and I never laugh out loud'
Chuck Palahniuk
'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny'
Jeffrey Eugenides
'Screamingly funny'
Geoff Dyer
'This book is a success: not only the belly-laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure it describes...Read Lipsyte and rejoice'
New York Times
'The riffs on fatherhood, work, and sex in Sam Lipsyte's unsparingly comic novel The Ask explode like a string of firecrackers - so funny you might lose an eye'
Vanity Fair --*
Product Description
I began to send out résumés. Late capitalism was a corpse, but you could still get lucky, couldn't you? Besides, I was so unaccomplished I could fit in anywhere. I'd never pose a threat to colleagues. That would be my angle.
Milo Burke -- husband to a 'touched-out' wife, father to a three-year-old son, fund-raising officer at a third-tier university -- has just joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed. As he grasps after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is contacted by Purdy Stuart, a wealthy, one-time university friend with a sinister agenda. It is the start of a hilarious and harrowing odyssey through several degrees of peculiarly 21st-century hell -- a journey recorded by Milo with the caustic eloquence that is his only means of defence.
The Ask is the best book yet from one of America's finest comic writers, an author who can prompt Chuck Palahniuk to write: 'I laughed out loud - and I never laugh out loud'. A critical sensation and a bestseller in the U.S., this is a ridiculously accomplished, ridiculously entertaining novel that sympathises even as it skewers.
Milo Burke -- husband to a 'touched-out' wife, father to a three-year-old son, fund-raising officer at a third-tier university -- has just joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed. As he grasps after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is contacted by Purdy Stuart, a wealthy, one-time university friend with a sinister agenda. It is the start of a hilarious and harrowing odyssey through several degrees of peculiarly 21st-century hell -- a journey recorded by Milo with the caustic eloquence that is his only means of defence.
The Ask is the best book yet from one of America's finest comic writers, an author who can prompt Chuck Palahniuk to write: 'I laughed out loud - and I never laugh out loud'. A critical sensation and a bestseller in the U.S., this is a ridiculously accomplished, ridiculously entertaining novel that sympathises even as it skewers.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Contemporary, fast moving, smart, witty, blokey, virtuoso prose, New York sensibility. I didn't like it much. I suspect this is not the right novel for me, a rather ponderous, British, Northern woman. I admired it in a detached sort of way but it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Someone left a comment on one of other reviews saying they had hoped (in vain) for something akin to Confederacy of Dunces. I'd considered similar comparisons. The protagonist, Milo Burke, is cut from the same cloth, but he's no Ignatius J. Reilly. Where Ignatius is hateful, arrogant, outrageous, hilarious and unique, Milo is simply annoying: a generic, leering, self-absorbed Sit-Com American loser. Maybe for reasons about myself cited above I found it difficult to identify with him, though when I recall other self-pitying American misogynists I have engaged with e.g. the eponymous Wilson of Daniel Clowes's brilliant graphic novel, I wonder whether it's more than just a cultural thing. This felt like the sort of dazzling new novel you are supposed to enthuse about because you can sense how clever it is, but secretly you would rather watch an episode of Emmerdale.
The other characters in the novel appeared to find Milo as tiresome as I did, though I didn't warm to any of them much either. The risk attendant upon assembling such an unlovable cast is that the reader has little incentive to care about what happens to them, and where does that leave the plot? I was fairly indifferent. Unlike some of the professional reviewers cited in the opening pages It didn't make me laugh out loud, I found the scenes between Milo and his mother quite funny but generally the conversations were a bit too slick and scripted.
Like others I came to this via the Guardian's glowing review but that's fair enough. I can be dispassionate enough to see that some people would rate it. How do you score a book? According to how good you suspect it might be (five stars all round for War and Peace) or how much it moved you on a personal level. I've plumped for the latter. I'm not saying it's poorly written, it just didn't speak to me. I can think of lots of other well-regarded novels that have done nothing for me either. Thank heavens we don't all have the same taste.
Someone left a comment on one of other reviews saying they had hoped (in vain) for something akin to Confederacy of Dunces. I'd considered similar comparisons. The protagonist, Milo Burke, is cut from the same cloth, but he's no Ignatius J. Reilly. Where Ignatius is hateful, arrogant, outrageous, hilarious and unique, Milo is simply annoying: a generic, leering, self-absorbed Sit-Com American loser. Maybe for reasons about myself cited above I found it difficult to identify with him, though when I recall other self-pitying American misogynists I have engaged with e.g. the eponymous Wilson of Daniel Clowes's brilliant graphic novel, I wonder whether it's more than just a cultural thing. This felt like the sort of dazzling new novel you are supposed to enthuse about because you can sense how clever it is, but secretly you would rather watch an episode of Emmerdale.
The other characters in the novel appeared to find Milo as tiresome as I did, though I didn't warm to any of them much either. The risk attendant upon assembling such an unlovable cast is that the reader has little incentive to care about what happens to them, and where does that leave the plot? I was fairly indifferent. Unlike some of the professional reviewers cited in the opening pages It didn't make me laugh out loud, I found the scenes between Milo and his mother quite funny but generally the conversations were a bit too slick and scripted.
Like others I came to this via the Guardian's glowing review but that's fair enough. I can be dispassionate enough to see that some people would rate it. How do you score a book? According to how good you suspect it might be (five stars all round for War and Peace) or how much it moved you on a personal level. I've plumped for the latter. I'm not saying it's poorly written, it just didn't speak to me. I can think of lots of other well-regarded novels that have done nothing for me either. Thank heavens we don't all have the same taste.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Technology gives us lots of shiny, virtual joys - and sometimes it makes us think that these are the real themes of life. The Ask, in the most funny way possible disputes this. The Ask describes the "cultural failure" of a virtual world and explains that the real themes of life continue to be very analogue: love, death, desire, failure.
It's funny. It moves fast. And it makes you want to glory in the words. We live in an era of "aggressively marketed nachos." says one sentence. It describes with much hilarity the "new" world and it a reminder that every moment spent blogging or virtual friending is one moment removed from real living: the real smells, fissures and hot-desire of our true, 'offline' worlds. I loved it.
It's funny. It moves fast. And it makes you want to glory in the words. We live in an era of "aggressively marketed nachos." says one sentence. It describes with much hilarity the "new" world and it a reminder that every moment spent blogging or virtual friending is one moment removed from real living: the real smells, fissures and hot-desire of our true, 'offline' worlds. I loved it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read The Ask in a week. It is a funny book. The writing is a total joy to suck through the eyeholes. Aside from being funny it is a real book where things happen and the characters remind you of people you have met and you care about what will happen. Its about Iraq, fatherhood, money, education, deciding who you are, who you are not and what is the best way to spend your time here on the planet. But mainly its about fatherhood. Which does not sound terribly exciting does it and I suppose its not but The Ask is a really really good, buy this book!
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Disappointing
This book was a book club choice. I read the existing reviews on Amazon and felt enthused by them,certain that the book club choice had introduced me to a really exciting read. Read more
Published 7 days ago by pollyanna12
very demanding
Not too bad for the first half, but soon runs out of steam. Unresolved plotlines, repetitive narration and probably about 100 pages too long. Read more
Published 5 months ago by blind pugh
Not much measures up to this
Sam Lipsyte is one of the best writers around today. If you want to read something which pushes the boundaries, stretches the envelope of our tired use of language in an... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Flagitious Crenallation
Not funny at all
I had read the glowing review of this book in the Observer, so was happy to read it for my book group, but not only did none of us (7) like it, not one of us managed to finish it. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Crime Buff
Boring and annoyingly full of itself
I found this book dull and very hard to bring myself to finish. Milo is a thoroughly unlikable character whose woes I could not manage to care about or even be slightly amused... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Mr. S. J. Reid
Asking too much
I read a review for The Ask in the Guardian, and immediately ordered it. It sounded fantastic. A funny diatribe against modern society. What could possibly go wrong? Read more
Published 17 months ago by Mr. R. A. W. Tock
Lots of serious fun
I enjoyed the book, wondering what the "hero" would do and how he would survive losing his job, and worse. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Ransen Owen
hip lit
post - post modern novel which grows on you. Sleekly written, engaging and witty plot....its where its at!
Published 22 months ago by abc1
Nobody better at intelligent humour...
... in my opinion! Sam Lipsyte has a fantastic handle on language, an ear for the subtle naunces of the everyday language of relationships, be they with a spouse or even the person... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Mark Porter
If...
If you're looking for a linear plot and gentle, standard prose, then this novel is definitely not for you. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Flying Flaubert
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
