From the peep palaces of Times Square to the cubicles of corporate America, Lipsyte's stories wander a dark, comic road full of need and regret. His damaged, searching narrators deliver their reports of addiction, lust, loneliness, and grief with a sly lyricism and eerie spareness that somehow redeem them.

An intense, mordantly funny collection of short fiction from Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and The Ask.

The Picador e-book edition includes an excerpt from The Ask.

A man with an old soul finds himself at a Times Square peep show, looking for more than just a little action. A young man goes into some serious regression after finding his deceased mother's stash of morphine. A group of summer-camp sadists return to the scene of the crime. Lipsyte's brutally funny narratives tread morally ambiguous terrain, where desperate characters stumble over hope, or sometimes merely stumble. Written with ferocious wit and surprising empathy, Venus Drive is a potent collection of stories from a wickedly gifted writer (Robert Stone).