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The Ask
Cover of The Ask
The Ask
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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 on both sides of the Atlantic, 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 on both sides of the Atlantic, this is a ridiculously accomplished, ridiculously entertaining novel that sympathises even as it skewers.

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About the Author-
  • The Ask is Sam Lipsyte's third novel. His last book, Home Land, won the first annual Believer Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2004.

Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from October 5, 2009
    Lipsyte’s pitch-black comedy takes aim at marriage, work, parenting, abject failure (the author’s signature soapbox) and a host of subjects you haven’t figured out how to feel bad about yet. This latest slice of mucked-up life follows Milo Burke, a washed-up painter living in Astoria, Queens, with his wife and three-year-old son, as he’s jerked in and out of employment at a mediocre university where Milo and his equally jaded cohorts solicit funding from the “Asks,” or those who financially support the art program. Milo’s latest target is Purdy Stuart, a former classmate turned nouveau aristocrat to whom Milo quickly becomes indentured. Purdy, it turns out, needs Milo to deliver payments to Purdy’s illegitimate son, a veteran of the Iraq War whose titanium legs are fodder for a disgruntlement that makes the chip on Milo’s shoulder a mere speck of dust by comparison. Submission is the order of the day, but where Home Land
    had a working-class trajectory, this takes its tone of lucid lament to the devastated white-collar sector; in its merciless assault on the duel between privilege and expectation, it arrives at a rare articulation of empire in decline.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from March 29, 2010
    Milo Burke is a trademark Lipsyte creation—a sad sack, sure, but a sweet guy, observant, acerbic, and very winning. A failed painter now working a dead-end job in the fund-raising department of a New York university, Milo is assigned to approach his charismatic and very wealthy college buddy, Purdy Stuart, for a big donation. Things aren't too serene on the domestic front either, and listeners can expect mordant musings on family and fatherhood, lust and the vapidity of office life, and a brutal sendup of academia. And the narration is a revelation: Lipsyte is cool and relaxed and transitions smoothly between monologue and dialogue. There are no strained characterizations—just subtle shifts that indicate a change in speaker—and as Milo, Lipsyte sounds just right—sullen, searching, and prone to sentimentality and sarcasm. Smart, compulsive listening. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 5).

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Sam Lipsyte
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