Home Land

From the Publisher

Catamount Notes, the Eastern Valley High School alumni newsletter, is filled with tales of success from the school's graduates, until Lewis "Teabag" Miner, class of 1989, sends a hilarious confession about his failure at love, work, and life. By the author of The Subject Steve.

Review

Darcy Cosper - Bookforum
"One might be tempted to explain Sam Lipsyte's relative obscurity by declaring him a talent ahead of his time--were it not for the fact that his fiction is very much of and about the present moment in a very particular, deft, loopy, magnificent way. Lipsyte's novels are ferocious, impressionistic portrait-parables of post-modern America which render this baffling epoch meaningful...in a way that precious little fiction can. And this is precisely what his third book, HOME LAND, accomplishes. A hilarious, ruthless, tender, and appealingly depraved work that should inspire, among other things, synapse-jamming envy in other writers...."

Review

New Yorker
"...Lipsyte transfigures Teabag's self-loathing into a sensibility that is both hilarious and noble."

Review

Lizzie Skurnick - New York Times Book Review
"[A] bracingly bleak new novel....But HOME LAND is not simply an account of life at the bottom of the food chain. Miner is too interesting a loser--in the face of his vast inconsequence, he remains unbowed."

Review

Brad Zellar - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Lewis Miner, the underachieving antihero of Lipsyte's latest novel, HOME LAND, is the sort of character Samuel Beckett or Flann O'Brien might have created had they been raised in suburbia and cut their teeth on heavy metal, bad television and the slighter offerings at the local multiplex theater. And if, I suppose I should add, they'd spent too much time hunched over a bong....[Lipsyte has a] fine comic voice, which is an often-thrilling combination of pitch-perfect drollery and absurd contortions."

Review

David Gates - Newsweek
"Lewis will win your heart early on....the kind of guy who gets stoned and imagines being strapped to 'a satellite in deep orbit, shooting out rays of entertainment'....HOME LAND is so good it even blurbs itself."

More about the book

Lewis Miner tells the story of his life--so far--in a series of comic letters he writes to his New Jersey high school's alumni newsletter. Lewis's cosmically uneventful life encompasses his strange father, his dense girlfriend, and a disastrous class reunion. Sam Lipsyte often chronicles the world of slackers in his fiction, and Lewis is one in a string of antiheroes famous for not doing much but doing it hilariously.

First Line

It's confession time, Catamounts. It's time you knew the cold soft facts of me.