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Shteyngart: I love your work on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Let me just drop a few of your best lines here. Let's see, there's "stick figure diagrams of abuse...." You make child abuse really funny, you know that?

Lipsyte: I have a little bit of guilt about that.

Shteyngart: The book has a weight to it, a kind of balance, and it's provided by the mother character. The mother dies of cancer and there's a mother who dies of cancer also in several stories in Venus Drive.

Lipsyte: Lacking imagination, I drew a lot of that from the death of my own mother. Not necessarily in the event. The autobiography is usually more in the feeling than in the event.

Shteyngart: I think Home Land wouldn't have been the same without her. And I think the child abuse part...

Lipsyte: Yes, they balance.

Shteyngart: I think there are some similarities in the work that we both do...

Lipsyte: Yes.

Shteyngart: What we both have to deal with is balancing humor and pathos.

Lipsyte: Comedy's hard, man. [laughs]

Shteyngart: But pathos isn't!

Lipsyte: It's very easy! I see a lot of pathos out there and not a lot of good comedy.

Shteyngart: And there are some great funny political references in your work. "Dreadlocked anarchists who follow the G8 like it's a legendary acid band."

Lipsyte: I remember this editor was trying to nominate Venus Drive for this Jewish book award. I asked him what was going on with that. And they said it's not Jewish enough to consider. And I said, "Dude, I think it's the most Jewish book out there." By the same token, I thought this [Home Land] was also a very political book. I didn't try to trumpet it as my 9/11 novel. I'm glad you picked up on those threads.

Shteyngart: But Jewish novels are pretty hot in the literary world...

Lipsyte: I think they're hot, but not if you're an American Jew with the kind of typical American Jewish experience. That's kind of done. But it's always about the how, not the what. That's kind of what I love about your book [The Russian Debutante's Handbook]. You took on some of these themes and you did it with humor, brio, and you wrote a real book. You didn't try to just pimp your heritage.

Shteyngart: Thank you. The funniest line in all of your work, I hope you won't disagree, is from Home Land. This is Teabag speaking to his principal, Mr. Fontana: "Some nights I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it's not napalm. It's apple butter. And it's not a street. It's my mother."

Lipsyte: I do like that one.

Shteyngart: What was going through your mind when you came up with that line. Do you stand in front of the mirror and practice these kinds of dialogue?

Lipsyte: I just get into these schizophrenic states where I have the conversation with myself. That line, I remember, I started with that napalm image—obviously we all know that photograph. Vietnam, or representations of Vietnam, warped a lot of people of my generation, watching Platoon over and over.... So I think I played around with that for a while and finally got in with that line.

Shteyngart: That jump from "It's not a street...It's my mother." We're so SAT-trained to think of what comes next after 'street' and then you just blow it out of the water with "It's my mother."

Lipsyte: You do want to take that strange leap that destroys the purity of a simple analogy.

Shteyngart: Which contemporary writers do you like?

Lipsyte: I'm a big fan of Gary Lutz. There's Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive. I really like Ben Marcus's stuff. Chris Sorrentino's book was really good. It's called Trance. It's a Patty Hearst novel. Gilbert Sorrentino, his father, is a very underrated writer. I could a name a few different names on any given day. Those are the ones I'll say right now. I'm not crazy about a lot of recent historical novels where it's very clear

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