Run Catch Kiss
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"I was only twenty-two and already I was infamous..." So begins Amy Sohn's hilarious and wise debut novel, Run Catch Kiss.
When the saucy Ariel Steiner returns home to New York City to be an actress, she is buoyed by daydreams of becoming Hollywood's hottest ingenue. Nothing can stand in her way -- nothing, that is, but her freshman-fifteen pounds, a senile talent agent, and the fact that she's living back home with her parents in Brooklyn.
While waiting for the ever-elusive big break, Ariel discovers a hidden talent for channeling her erotic fantasies and becomes a sex columnist at New York's hottest downtown weekly. Soon, art and life are imitating one another, and the junkies, commitmentphobes, and other subjects of Ariel's columns are wreaking havoc on her life. But when she finally falls in love, the real Ariel must stand up. Is she a nice Jewish girl who wants to settle down or a brazen sex kitten who'd rather meet a deadline than the man of her dreams?
Sharp, savvy, and irresistible, Run Catch Kiss is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on that dangerous turn-of-the-century phenomenon: the single girl who wants it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Life imitates art for a 22-year-old downtown Manhattan sex columnist in Sohn's raunchy, scathing and slippery debut. Ariel Steiner, an aspiring actress, sexpot and self-described failure, retreats to her parents' Brooklyn Heights home the summer after graduating from Brown. Scrambling in vain for a glamorous career and boyfriend, she settles for a temp secretary job to a woman she calls "Corposhit," using lunch hour to audition for "fat-girl" parts (she never lost her "freshman fifteen" pounds). The heroine has chutzpah, though, a quality that wins her the title role in a tacky musical, Lolita: Rock On, and humiliating dates with unsavory men. Fed up with the "overall suck quotient" of her summer, she submits a blow-by-blow account of her sexual frustrations to a downtown weekly paper and is instantly offered a column, entitled "Run Catch Kiss"--a kind of "perils of Pauline from a slacker slut perspective." The newspaper is modeled on the actual New York Press, for which Sohn writes a similar column, and this novel retreads much of that material. Ariel enjoys a kind of creepy, thrilling notoriety, replete with fan and hate mail, until she begins embellishing her stories to compensate for her real-life love doldrums and runs into trouble with the newspaper's management. Sohn's writing, with its graphic sex, can be smug or comical, but she's best when imperious snugglebunny Ariel lets her guard down and confronts her humiliations with honesty and pluck. The portrait of Ariel's parents is sympathetic, even witty, in contrast to her mostly narcissistic goofball boyfriends. Sohn's take on the Gen-X dating scene mirrors her skewering of showbiz and journalism, and while readers may not believe that deep down Ariel is just a nice Jewish girl looking for love and success, many will agree that she's brash, smart, fearless and funny.
