- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 10 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0684867532
- ISBN-13: 978-0684867533
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.1 x 1.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 272 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (103 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,281,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Amy Sohn lives in New York, where she writes a raunchy column for the New York Press called "Female Trouble." Her first novel features a young woman named Ariel Steiner, who lives in New York and writes a raunchy column called "Run Catch Kiss" for City Week. Any other similarities between author and creation are, no doubt, purely accidental. We first meet Ariel the summer after her graduation from college when she returns to the city, ready to resume the acting career she had as a child. Unfortunately, college not only enlarged Ariel's mind--it had a broadening effect on her body as well. "I can't send you out for any ingenue parts until you lose fifteen pounds," her agent tells her. Ariel is sure this won't take long and indulges in an optimistic fantasy about the fame and fortune that will soon come her way once she's lost the weight--an appearance in a George C. Wolfe production; a walk-on in a George Clooney film; an Oscar-winning performance in a Woody Allen movie, complete with requisite Oscar fantasy: "I'd bring my father as my date, and when Jack Palance opened the envelope and announced me as the winner, I'd run up to the stage in a strapless Chanel and they'd cut to a shot of my dad drowning in a sea of his own mucus." But until the day when Ariel Steiner becomes the third part of a Hollywood girl-triumvirate comprised of herself, Gwyneth, and Winona, a girl's got to eat; and so begins a ribaldly picaresque journey from actress wannabe to infamous New York sex columnist--"the Hester Prynne of downtown."
Run Catch Kiss is a novel that will appeal to a very specific audience--fans of Amy Sohn; young college graduates who'd like to imagine it's really this easy to achieve notoriety in a city like New York; and readers who enjoy lots of name-dropping, club-hopping, and frank descriptions of sex and other bodily functions. Sohn includes several of Ariel's columns ("Stench of a Woman," for example, or "Smutlife") as well as the letters she gets in response. In between, Ariel and her cronies and assorted one-night stands hang out in places with names like BarF and BarBarella, and drop pop references to Gen-X movies and music. Sohn delivers it all up with moxie, making up for the novel's literary weaknesses by sheer full-frontal outrageousness. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From 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"Aa 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. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I WAS ONLY TWENTY-TWO and already I was infamous. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I WAS ONLY TWENTY-TWO and already I was infamous. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Even Bother,
By A Customer
This review is from: Run Catch Kiss: A Novel (Paperback)
This has to be the worst thing I have ever read. The characters self esteme must be in the gutter because of all the guys she wants to hook up with, plus she masturbates while someone is talking to her.Whoever lives a life like this in reality I don't envy them. I am not easily shocked, but some of the stuff coming from the pages of the book were just horrendous. I paid $1.99 at an A&P for this, it would have less painful just to throw it down the drain.
4.0 out of 5 stars
More than a Sex and the City Wannabe,
By
This review is from: Run Catch Kiss (Hardcover)
It was only natural that Sohn was tapped to compile the official Sex and the City book, because the parallel between Run Catch Kiss's Ariel Steiner and Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw is obvious: single women in New York writing a column about love/sex/dating in a local rag, and their various misadventures end up memorialized in print. Where the two part company is Ariel Steiner's ineptitude. Satisfying her editors with bawdy details of her life, she barely disguises the names of her dates and becomes quite infamous very quickly, resulting in the loss of potentially good propects for fear of having their lives revealed in print, and the attraction of those who would do anything for the exposure. What kept me reading was Sohn's wickedly funny phrasings. I find it difficult to describe them--you just have to see 'em to believe 'em. She finds a way to take a mundane event and recast it in its snappiest, most humorous light. The book screams for a sequal, and I, for one, hope Sohn delivers.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Catch the fun!,
By Bri Meets Books (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Run Catch Kiss: A Novel (Paperback)
This book, although very sexually graphic at times, is quite a thrill to read and will be probably be embraced for anybody looking for a fix till the next 'Bridget Jones' Diary' book.But 'Run Catch Kiss' has it's own rewards, in the form of a deliciously sexy narrative of Ariel Steiner, a twentysomething wannabe actress who's being cast in 'the fat girl' roles. She takes her sex escapades to the streets, cranking out a scandalous column (Her father remarks, "Your mother is thinking of getting shirts that say 'It isn't true") But the results aren't what she bargained for. Clever, witty and downright funny, Run Catch Kiss is a fitting title to join and...overtake the troupe of 'chick lit' books that seem to crowd the shelves these days.
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