Sam Lipsyte (born 1968) is an American novelist and short story writer.

Life

The son of the sports journalist Robert Lipsyte, Sam Lipsyte was born in New York City and raised in Closter, New Jersey, where he attended Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest. He attended Brown University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1990. At Brown, Lipsyte lived with Steven Johnson. Lipsyte was an editor at the webzine FEED. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Quarterly, The New Yorker, Harper's, Noon, Tin House, Open City, N+1, Slate, McSweeney's, Esquire, GQ, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Nouvelle Revue Française, The Paris Review, This Land, and Playboy, among other places. Lipsyte's work is characterized by its verbal acumen and black humor. His books have been translated into several languages, including French, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. His novel The Ask was published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010, and in the United Kingdom by Old Street Publishing. In May 2011, HBO announced development of a comedy, "People City," based on Lipsyte's work, with Lipsyte serving as writer and executive producer. He lives in Manhattan and teaches fiction at Columbia University.

Awards

His novel Home Land was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2005 and winner of the inaugural 2004 Believer Book Award. Venus Drive was named one of the 25 Best Books of 2000 by The Village Voice Literary Supplement. In 2008, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Books

Articles and other contributions