By the acclaimed author of Platitudes and Home Repairs, Right Here, Right Now is a devilish and voluptuous satire that delves with uproarious incisiveness into the seemingly unquenchable American zeal for "self-improvement." With the same inventiveness and mordant humor that Ellis's readers have come to expect from his work, he aims his sights on the billion-dollar self-help industry and the New Age movement, and their logical extremes.

Meet Ashton Robinson, a dashing playboy whose suave charm, worldly pretensions, and ecstatic seminars have made him one of the most successful motivational speakers in the country. Though he was raised in a black working-class neighborhood in Flint, Michigan, Robinson has reinvented himself as a larger-than-life Renaissance man: a Yale-educated, millionaire surfer who speaks several languages and has explored nearly every corner of the globe. Now, when he's not in his sprawling mansion overlooking the Pacific, he spends his life crisscrossing the country with his devoted — if cynical — staff, delivering exclusively priced charge-'em-up speeches everywhere from airport hotel conference rooms to jet-set Caribbean resorts. His clients, chiefly midlevel executives desperate to better themselves and oust their oppressive bosses, worship the ground he walks on.

Yet, after an encounter with the synergistic effects of marijuana and expired cough syrup, Robinson renounces his life as a self-help icon and pronounces himself a spiritually enlightened master. Overnight he invents the world's newest religion, based on meditation, bungee-cord jumping, tantric sex, and The Gap. Meanwhile, the FBI has gotten wind of Robinson's sequestered, libertine community and moves to action.

Right Here, Right Now never ceases to catch the reader off guard. In the story, which is told from Robinson's point of view, one cannot be sure what is real and what is mere perception. His activities are at once innocuously prurient and alarming. Has the same outsized ego that fueled his success as a motivational speaker driven him over the edge? Has he stumbled upon one of the great truths of the universe?

Trey Ellis has written a titillating and trenchant tale about the revivalist fervor of the American self-help industry. Right Here, Right Now is a corrosively funny and provocative exploration of the impulse to self-improvement — one of the most salient features of American popular culture at the close of the twentieth century.

"This book is billed as a satire of American's thirst for 'self help' and is either so satirical as not to be funny anymore, or very much misrepresented by its cover-flaps. We follow the protagonist as he, as a result of a vision brought on by out of date cough syrup, moves from self-help infomercial star to guru of a cult based on meditation and sex. Although it sounds promising as a premise, the book is ultimately a disappointment. The protagonist is not very likeable, and toward the end of the book you just want to get it over with. The author's conceit that the book is a transcript of audiotapes this man makes as his diary is necessary for the plot, but doesn't always hold up; sometimes he speaks as one would to a recorder, sometimes the prose lapses into internal monologue which is just not believable from a tape recorder. Reminiscent of Stranger in a Strange Land, with more explicit sex scenes, and not quite as interesting otherwise." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

Trey Ellis is the author of Platitudes and Home Repairs, as well as a screenwriter and essayist. He lives in Santa Monica, California.