The Ask - Tapa blanda

'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 --*

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.