“Arnold Palmer died today. The news anchor announces it on the TV hanging in the corner as I’m dealt a pair of 9’s at a Jacks or Better machine. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that the news anchor previously stated an unarmed twelve-year-old boy was shot dead by a police officer for stealing a Snickers bar. It doesn’t matter that I'm a middle-aged white man who travels an hour and a half from Mesquite to Las Vegas five times a week to play high-stakes video poker and haven't won in fourteen days. And it doesn't matter that the AC blasting on the casino floor at the Wynn doesn’t cool my sweat stains from the arid desert heat outside. All that matters, even though I haven't heard his name in years, is that Arnold Palmer is dead.”

-excerpt from The King of Video Poker

“No one Left to Come Looking for You” By Sam Lipsyte Book Review 

The odyssey of an aspiring bassist through a gritty ‘90s East Village. 

“No one Left to Come Looking for You” is a remarkable novel about an aspiring punk rocker, Jack Shit (his real name is Jonathan Liptak but he’s in a band called the Shits, and changes his name to Jack Shit, which becomes a running joke throughout the book), wandering the gritty streets of the East Village in the ‘90s in search for his missing bass and his junkie lead singer who stole it. He gets a call from his friend working at a pawn shop, warning him that someone is there trying to pawn his missing bass. He stops everything and abruptly shows up. And from there everything unravels. Dive bars. Sticky music venues. Shady weirdos. Drugs. Cheap rent. A seedy crime-infested underbelly. Murder. A clogged bar toilet. A dog named Bollocks. They never venture past 14th street, in fact they only do once, and they find themselves in quite the mess when they do. Donald Trump is an evil figure offscreen. It’s a rather pulpy plot with hard-boiled dialogue and caricaturesque characters–freakish goons, corrupt cops, sinister real estate barons—but a detective novel approached with literary finesse; every sentence glitters off the page with originality, humor, and a tongue-in-cheek manner reminiscent of Bukowski’s swan song, “Pulp.” “No one Left to Come Looking for You” shows Sam Lipsyte in total control of his craft, wielding his writerly sword with great wit, aware of what he’s doing at every turn, sprinkling humor in all the details, whether it be the band names or the monologues from the author in Jersey.    

The book is a beautiful love letter to a bygone era of NYC, to a time when aspiring artists could still afford to chase their dreams.