
Bookforum talks to Sam Lipsyte
"The comics that I’ve liked, and really the comic writers that I’ve liked, they all did it through language. That’s the thing when you are writing prose, that’s what you have. You don’t have comic gestures. You can’t even wear an arrow through your head. You just have the words. You have to learn to adjust."
Around the turn of the millennium, Sam Lipsyte was an almost secret writer who inspired obsessive admiration. I had started to write fiction then, and my fellow aspiring writers and I would share Lipsyte rarities—a story in a back issue of Open City or NOON, a well-worn copy of his debut story collection Venus Drive (2000) or The Subject Steve (2001)—like pre-internet punk rockers trading tape dubs of out-of-print 7-inches. He’s not so secret anymore, particularly since his critically acclaimed novel The Ask (2010), but his work continues to generate a rare sense of excitement among the writers