Lech - by Sara Lippmann (Paperback)

About the Book

Set over the course of one summer in upstate New York, this novel mixes the lives of strangers, family, friends, and neighbors to explore--with humor--the predatory side of human nature through conflicts of faith, trauma, desire, and longing.

Book Synopsis

A mother recovering from an abortion in a Borscht Belt rental. An eccentric aging landlord, haunted by a mysterious death. A grief-stricken Hasid. A scheming real estate agent looking for her break, her dogged daughter longing for her way out (specifically, a career as a human mermaid), and her addict boyfriend mired in it.

These lives-strangers, neighbors, family, friends--entwine and separate over the course of one fevered upstate summer, in a haunting and hilarious debut novel by acclaimed author Sara Lippmann. In her inimitable prose, she mercilessly explores the predatory side of human nature through conflicts of faith, trauma, desire, belonging, and longing--the particulars of Judaism and feminism, parenting and partying, small-town life and big blundering dreams, as well as the timeless question: How do we carry on?

Review Quotes

"What an extraordinary,
razor-sharp, utterly original and gripping voice. Sara Lippmann's Lech is at once a painstakingly drawn
exploration of claustrophobia, exploitation, predation, and place, and a primal
howl of rage let loose in the wind. Told in unflinching prose and with searing
poetic intensity Lech burns with all the fury
and tenderness of an open wound."
- Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth
Muse

"Lech is the ambitious debut novel of an
excellent new prose stylist."
- The Millions

"A funny, brutal, symphonic novel from a
writer with intensity and authority to spare. The world of Lech is
as vivid, as wild, and as shockingly familiar as life itself, but way more
interesting and way better told."
- Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

"Lippmann's amiable writing makes for
great company."
- Publishers Weekly

"Lech takes place over a single
summer in the Catskills, but it's far bigger than that. Sara Lippmann is finely
attuned to the cultural, political, and religious tensions that arise between
the vacationers and the locals, between the haves and the have-nots. And, wow,
those sentences! Lippmann writes like a dream."
- Joshua Henkin, author of Morningside
Heights

"For the right reader, this jigsaw puzzle
of a novel will be a pleasure."
- Kirkus Reviews

"Sara Lippmann's novel Lech is
quilted together with loose stitching, holding the sensual with the grotesque,
the intimate with the alienated, the paratactic with the full, and on and on.
It is masterfully composed."

- Seth Rogoff, author of Thin Rising Vapors

"Sara Lippmann's Lech is a
superb Jewish gothic, an expertly pitched polyvocal tale of family, loss, and
redemption. By turns funny, beautiful, lewd and heartbreaking, Lippmann
delivers a literary performance with all the timing and energy of a great
Borscht Belt comic."

- Adam O'Fallon Price, author of The Hotel Neversink

About the Author

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collections Doll Palace re-released by 713 Books, and Jerks from Mason Jar Press. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Best Small Fictions,
Epiphany, Split Lip and elsewhere. She teaches with Jericho
Writers and lives with her family in Brooklyn.