What's Not To Love? - Softcover

Jonathan Ames

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684861577 ISBN 13: 9780684861579

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

"Jonathan Ames is one of the funniest writers in America," so says Jonathan Ames, who is actually writing this flap copy, which is the publishing industry term for the boastful fluff you read on the inner portion of most hardcover book jackets. So let the truth be known: Most writers write or at least rewrite their flap copy. And why not? They are writers after all. For the flap copy on my last novel, I had the audacity to pronounce that I was one of America's most talented young writers. My mother read that and was very proud, pointing it out to me. I then said to her, "I wrote that." But she was still proud; she probably didn't believe that I wrote it. In fact, she doesn't believe most of what I tell her, but that's probably because she couldn't take it if she did believe me. Which is a good way to describe this book, this comic autobiography: It's the kind of book one's mother shouldn't read, though there are several passages where I profess my great Oedipal love and desire for my mother, which she might find flattering. What else recommends this book, or, rather, what recommends me, since this book is about me. Well, I'm bald and ribald, I'm like Rabelais and Danny Kaye, sometimes I'm straight and sometimes I'm gay. Well, not really. I'm almost never gay, but it rhymed nicely with Kaye, and also I tend to be depressed rather than gay. But I do like to make others laugh, so if you're standing in a bookstore, I hope you'll find this book funny and I hope that you'll move on to my introduction, where I'll further implore you to keep reading, with the idea that you'll eventually purchase the book, which is the point, by the way, of flap copy.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Shy exhibitionist Jonathan Ames -- a man who makes scatology charming (hey -- no easy task) -- has all the qualities it takes to be a great writer: he's fearless, neurotic, worldly, tortured, a unique stylist, excruciatingly honest, slightly creepy, polite (yet attuned to the sham of etiquette), a killer comedian with a healthy dose of self-loathing, tender, and -- most important of all -- mordantly obsessed with his own penis."
-- Bret Easton Ellis

"The individual episodes, chapters, rhapsodies -- call them what you will -- in What's Not to Love? are so beguiling, so insouciant, so seemingly breathed onto the page, that it's impossible to miss the fact that the memoir, book, collection -- call it what you will -- as a whole has the formal elegance and perfect wholeness of one of Ames' two extraordinary novels."        
-- Jonathan Lethem

"A lively, funny, and utterly frank account of a young man's journey, fraught with personal discoveries. An extraordinary guidebook!"        
-- George Plimpton

About the Author

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night and The Extra Man, and writes the popular column "City Slicker" for the New York Press. He lives in New York City, where he performs frequently as a storyteller in theaters and nightclubs. His one-man show, Oedipussy, debuted off-off-Broadway in 1999. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684861577
• ISBN 13: 9780684861579
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240