Jerks - by Sara Lippmann (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

With Jerks, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives--desire is a live wire, however frayed; a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth living. The messy characters in these eighteen stories may hack up their bedsheets with group sex, anonymous sex, infidelity, and a literal handsaw, but there's tenderness, too, among the lust and rage. With crisp precision, ample honesty and desperate humor, Lippmann delivers an irresistibly fraught cast of characters at various stages of undress.

Review Quotes

"Lippmann packs a great deal into a single turn of phrase, balancing vulnerability and humor with luminescent prose. The compression and bursts of poignancy will remind readers of Kathy Fish and Amy Hempel."
-- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"I loved it. Efficient, daring and fearless--Sara Lippmann aims right for the heart of our confused desire. She gets us inside the female experience, not just of lust but of the tedium and resentment, the long grind that lurks beneath the slow burn."
-- Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World

"Sara Lippmann has a major talent; she can create a whole world in five pages or less. The stories in JERKS are funny and vibrant and heartbreakingly real."
-- Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice

"Sara Lippmann is a master of the absurd realities that comprise our American domestic lives. The stories in JERKS crackles with urgent, electric prose that sets fire to every sentence on every page. Funny, daring, brutal, honest, brilliant. Lippmann is dazzling."
-- Robert Lopez, author of A Better Class of People

"Sara Lippmann is the shit. JERKS is all killer, no filler. Vividly funny, full of heart, devastating. They should carve this book onto the side of a mountain."
-- Bud Smith, author of Teenager

"Reading JERKS is as satisfying as misbehaving yourself. Lippmann's collection is a fearless study of our most carnal desires and what we'll do to experience them fully. Taut and expansive, funny and merciless, this is an electric collection you won't soon forget."
-- Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk: Stories

"With her effortless dry humor and swift prose, Lippmann leads us to the field where our desires rage like wildfire, and keeps us there long enough to witness small kindling of hope in the fire's aftermath."
--
Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm

"With lyricism and stinging humor, Lippmann brings us characters who are utterly lost and yet somehow hopeful, both compassionate and deeply cruel, and above all, painfully real."
-- Karen Pittelman, poet/singer/songwriter of Karen & The Sorrows

"The surprise of a Lippmann story--be it within the line, in a character's interiority, or in the story as a whole--means that every story feels as though it is thrumming with life. There is a lovely tension that is created between the vibrancy of the stories and the lives of the characters within the stories. Even though the characters in Jerks are often stuck in their lives, that sense of life, of possibility, of creation, runs throughout the collection, uniting the stories as one."
-- Ploughshares

"Lippmann tells expansive stories in such condensed form. In the heart and relatability of each story, we recognize our own fumbling desperations."
-- Necessary Fiction

"You probably won't love these characters, but you will see yourself in them"
-- Chicago Review of Books

"For as painful as the stories could be, I laughed or snorted in almost equal measure. I loved these stories for their flavor, for their mixture of escape and reality, and for their double punch of pleasure and
pain."
-- The Masters Review

About the Author

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published by Tortoise Books in 2026. She lives in Brooklyn.