Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (Open City Books, 2000) and three novels, including The Ask (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), a New York Times Notable Book, and Home Land (Picador, 2004), a New York Times Notable book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award.  A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, his fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Quarterly, Tin House, and Noon, among others. He teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.