No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

Zine queen Ayun Halliday confesses the best-and worst-of her globetrotting misadventures. "I laughed hard on nearly every page of this shockingly intimate memoir and deeply funny book." -- Stephen Colbert

Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerrilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. On layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light district -- eliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam, and is forced to explain tampons to soldiers in Kashmir -- "they're for ladies. Bleeding ladies" -- that, she admits, "might have looked like white cotton bullets lined up in their box."

A self-admittedly bumbling vacationer, Halliday shares -- with razor-sharp wit and to hilarious effect -- the travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell.

Includes line drawings, generously provided by the author.

​Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the long running, award-winning East Village Inky zine and author of nine books, including the self-mocking autobiographies No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late and, most recently, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and its interactive companion Creative, Not Famous Activity Book: An Interactive Idea Generator for Small Potatoes & Others Who Want to Get Their Ayuss in Gear. She lives in East Harlem with the playwright Greg Kotis, where she is hard at work on a dystopian novel set in her childhood branch library.