A Year in Van Nuys

It’s no Provence . . .

“Screamingly funny . . . enormously quick-witted . . . a delight.” — USA Today

“Smart and sardonic.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Loh writes movingly.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Reaches lovely heights of parody . . . sharp characterizing . . . funny . . . reads like an extended NPR rap just before the top of the hour.” — Booklist

“It’s like Bridget Jones on crystal meth, coming off a night of Cosmopolitans and Valium, with killer observations and killer jokes ricocheting from page to page. It all works.”-- San Diego Union-Tribune

“There’s probably no place on earth that Loh can’t spoof and make us laugh about.” — Santa Cruz Sentinel

“Van Nuys was just this furnace that could easily destroy any creative thought that managed to creep into your mind,” Robert Redford once stated. One would never imagine finding a muse in a place like this, but for Sandra Tsing Loh, a self-described neurotic, Van Nuys is it.

In A Year in Van Nuys, we find Sandra, an obscure writer blocked at page 100 of her Great American Novel, with eyebags like Bert Lahr, a $300-an-hour Malibu therapist, and a too-thin, too-rich sister who torments her over her lack of motivation. Loh blisters the page with bone-dry humor and close observations of Van Nuys and the San Fernando Valley—a place consistently ranked one of the worst places to live in America. Sandra’s Van Nuys is a smoggy gray purgatory inhabited by her Spriteless and perennially over-the-hill suburban generation, a plagued world fueled by Nyquil Cosmopolitans, Gap swing-dancers, and obnoxious overachievers.

Think of A Year in Van Nuys as Sex and the City—with no sex, no city. Still, for certain types of low-impact personalities, it’s the most fun you can have lying down.

From the critically acclaimed author of "Depth Takes a Holiday" comes a hilarious Southern California send-up of "A Year in Provence." Divided into seasons, "A Year in Van Nuys" takes readers through a year of Loh's wildly funny life in this suburb from hell. 13 line drawings.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer and performer who has written three books: Depth Takes a Holiday, Aliens in America, and If You Lived Here, Youd Be Home Now. She received the Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 1995 for her short story, “My Fathers Chinese Wives.

From the Hardcover edition.