Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

My guest today is the wacky, obscene, satirical writer Sam Lipsight.

His new book is The Ask, published by Farr Strauss and Giroux, a wild and sometimes ugly comic novel about what happens when the bottom falls out at the cultural fundraising office of a mediocre college.

He's the author, as well, in reverse order of Homeland, the subject Steve, and Venus Drive.

Now, what interests me is that starting, I think, with Animal House, critics writing about

movies about the world in which chaos rules and the most chaotic is king, They started calling them sweating warthog movies.

And to some extent, Sam Lipsite writes sweating warthog novels.

They're about being angry, about being smart, funny, witty, scabrous, clever, and caught in a culture that no longer values or treasures those things.

These books are attempts to rescue the category of loser as something other than the accusation it's turned into in our time.

I think that we've lost the sense that the loser, by which I mean anyone who is marginalized

in some way or feels outside of the machine of culture, politics. And, you know,

loser must include some of the great prophets of the Bible as well. But we've forgotten that we can

get sort of truths from these voices. We've forgotten that we can get a perspective on the way we live our lives

that we don't necessarily get from the voices that are at the center of discussion

and that tend to cast the aspersion loser and other words like that.

Now, I have to say that Sam's books scare me because they are terrifically funny, but they're books that don't provide an escape exit.

You know, if you're caught, you're caught.

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