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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
He may come across poorly in that tweet, but he is a damn good novelist.
Posted by: James | February 27, 2012 at 01:30 PM
This needs to go to @Humblebrag.
Posted by: tomslee | February 27, 2012 at 01:45 PM
Respectfully disagree, James. Have always thought BEE writes shopping lists, not novels.
Posted by: TEV | February 27, 2012 at 03:28 PM
I really don't think you understand what he is doing. This is not a brag. This Bret Easton Ellis the novelist continuing to write the story of Bret Easton Ellis the twitter character.
Posted by: David | February 27, 2012 at 03:41 PM
If that's the case, I'd hope he could come up with a more interesting "character." I've always suspected that BEE's forays into PoMo/Meta are merely masks for the inherent shallowness of his writing.
Posted by: TEV | February 27, 2012 at 06:08 PM
Anatomy of a Tweet. The title of his next novel. (Of course for me and pals in those back when pot-smoking days, long before tweeting was a term, "tweet" referred to someone as a bird brain.) So the novel is about this guy who goes around Hollywood tweeting about all the shallow people around him. What some would call a novel imitating writing.
Posted by: Raymond Cothern | February 27, 2012 at 09:09 PM
I think Bret Easton's style is what lands him in the middle of debates like these... BEE the writer suffers far too often because minimalism and being spartan spill over into zombie-crawling your way through whatever new abomination BEE the provocateur has thought of...
Posted by: Aditya Mani Jha | February 27, 2012 at 09:11 PM
I love that you're deconstructing a twitter feed. (Perhaps all the more so because it's 12:15 a.m. in NY.... Social media, blog comments included, seems to lend itself to self-referentiality - and if that is a word, it's a horrible one.)
I belatedly started reading a New Yorker piece today from Feb. 6, "The Story of a Suicide," by Ian Parker, which so far I would say is very well done and also suggests the subject of twitter and construction of self. Well worth a read, all the more so if you've paid any attention to the D'Agata business about truth over factuality (this weekend's NYT...). Parker's piece offers a wonderful counter-argument to D'Agata's fact-lite approach: an essay can (and should) be factual as well as "true."
I suspect BEE's tweet is both also, illustrating that the combination need not automatically indicate artistic value.
Posted by: Kara | February 27, 2012 at 09:43 PM
A tart way to clean the palate after the Oscars.
Posted by: Shelley | February 28, 2012 at 08:35 AM
Also, "No lawyers, managers or agents thanked" shows how artistically pure and free of commercial considerations he is.
Posted by: Pete | February 28, 2012 at 10:28 AM
Isn't this a mis-use of the word 'Deconstruction'?
Posted by: P | March 10, 2012 at 03:36 AM
'misuse' ;)
Posted by: P | March 10, 2012 at 03:37 AM
Bret Easton Ellis has a public persona to uphold, but he's really a most pleasant, polite fellow. Was most gracious at SCAD on book tour
Posted by: Georgia Lee | June 29, 2012 at 09:16 PM