The Fun Parts: Stories Audiobook

A writer Time magazine has said “everybody should read,” Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times bestselling The Ask, offers up The Fun Parts, a book of bold, hilarious, and deeply felt fiction. A boy eats his way to self-discovery, while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. In another story, an aerobics instructor, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the tales, some first published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Playboy, that unfold in Lipsyte’s richly imagined world.

Other stories feature a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a dooms-day hustler about to face the multi-universal truth of “the real-ass jumbo,” and a tawdry glimpse of the northern New Jersey high school shot-putting circuit, circa 1986. Combining both the tragicomic dazzle of his beloved novels and the compressed vitality of his classic debut collection, Venus Drive, The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his best—an exploration of new voices and vistas in the form with which he began.

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“In this second story collection, fierce satire mingles withwarmth and pathos as Lipsyte showcases his knack for stylistic variety andtangles with the thorny human experiences of moving beyond one’s past orshedding one’s personal baggage…Lipsyte’s biting humor suffuses the collection,but it’s his ability to control the relative darkness of each moment that makesthe stories so engrossing.”

— Publishers Weekly