[A] sour and scintillating new collection of short stories... The dialogue constantly sparkles and unsettles, with strange seismic shifts going on beneath the surface of the prose. You won't read finer sentences this year
Stuart Kelly
Scotland on Sunday
An idiosyncratic, hyperactively rendered collection where words and ideas collide to dazzling effect... dementedly imaginative... Sharp and deeply, ... Read moreblackly funny
Metro
Sublime mayhem! Lipsyte expertly works the line between hilarity and pathos... Revelation, wisdom, inner peace - they come hard in Lipsyte's world, if they come at all, which doesn't keep these stories from being a hoot... He delivers plenty of funk, spunk and fizz
Ben Fountain
New York Times
Lipsyte shows himself to be perfectly in control of, and apparently unintimidated by, his own brilliance... Inventive, daring, and wildly funny
Rozalind Dineen
TLS
A brilliantly funny writer... Lipsyte's writing is so biting, so inventive, you find yourself rereading whole paragraphs for the pleasure of it
Tom Fleming
Literary Review
Lipsyte specialises in dark, scabrous stories that are nearly always horribly, excruciatingly funny
Louis Wise
Sunday Times
Lipsyte's understanding of modern spite, rage and self-destruction is peerless... Brilliant
William Leith
Financial Times
Supersaturated with humor, depth, acuity, pain, a warped sense of grace, and the rolling thunder of Lipsyte's matchless prose
Books of the Year
Vice
Lipsyte is a precise and perceptive observer, capable of impaling a lifestyle with one sparse aside
Tim Lewis
Guardian
He is a detail fiend, a maximalist who possesses an expansive linguistic imagination that can satisfy his leanings... [In The Fun Parts] you'll encounter a writer's vision that is slant but acute
Kevin Barry
Guardian
Lipsyte has built his career writing pitch-black comedies... His stories can be wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad, sometimes in the same sentence
Wall Street Journal
Lipsyte blends the humorous and the heartfelt, the riotous and the despairing
New Yorker
Fierce satire mingles with warmth and pathos as Lipsyte showcases his knack for stylistic variety and tangles with the thorny human experiences of moving beyond one's past or shedding 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 makes the stories so engrossing
Publishers’ Weekly (starred review)
The Fun Parts showcases stories whose sheer telling-their force; their rhythmic momentum-tends to matter more than what they tell of... Lipsyte's stories exhibit a near-geometrical elegance. They're fun; they hurt; they have fun with hurt; but under it all is the sound of silk spinning and quickening, arcing from nothing to nothing-or the sight of an iron moon in mid-flight... The everyday is replayed as poetry
David Winters
The Quarterly Conversation
It has that grim magic, [it] conjures up a world both forgotten and new and teaches the reader something essential
Jim Ruland
San Diego City Beat
Whether Lipsyte's prose is brutally simple or self-parodyingly ostentatious, it is always clear as vodka in its contempt for the human race
Sunday Telegraph
Cute, spry and bizarre... funny
Tom Macaulay
Sunday Times
Clever enough to pack his tales with a profusion of funny lines, Lipsyte's humane view of the world steers him away from the glibness that would have made this book far less palatable
Alastair Mabbott
Herald
He spins out his lines at a breakneck clip, the riffs come thick and fast, and the gags are sprayed on with a machine gun... a whole lot of fun
Kevin Barry
Guardian
Undeniably clever, and linguistically inventive
Independent on Sunday
A horrible world beautifully pinned down
William Leith
Scotsman
Subversive and funny and full of heart
Tom Barbash
Independent Magazine
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