Synopses & Reviews
Area Code 212 is filled with idiosyncratic delights and oddities of New York's wittiest social chroniclers, Tama Janowitz. Included in this book is her hilarious account of Andy Warhol's eighties blind date club; her brief moment of celebrity as an elderly teenage extra in a ZZ Top video; the day she tested mentally retarded on an IQ test; and many other revealing tales of New York life, including its parties, its restaurants, and its fashion. Janowitz gives us her unique lowdown on her 1990s conversion from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on hairless dogs and ferrets, babies, the outer boroughs, big hair days, and bad hair days.
Review
"Wry and affectionate observations of New York. . . [Janowitz's] awkward persona is winning and non-calculated"
--New York Post, ***
"'The '80s died in Manhattan in 1987, along with Andy Warhol,' [Janowitz] writes. But Janowitz herself, older and more self-critical, is still going strong."
--Publishers Weekly
"Janowitz's caustic wit, her taste for the sordid and the absurd, and her knack for skewering the fashionable and championing the clueless are as vividly present in her pithy nonfiction as they are in her spiky novels."
--Booklist
"In a loose and ferociously swift style, Janowitz spreads her views across the table and, as in her fiction, strings the most beautifully unexpected observations together without stopping once to congratulate herself." --Time Out New York
"These funny, flawless descriptions of interior New York tell us why some people never leave." --LA Times
"Delineated with a pleasingly naked candor." --Kirkus
Synopsis
"Area Code 212" is filled with idiosyncratic delights and oddities of New York's wittiest social chroniclers, Tama Janowitz. Included in this book is her hilarious account of Andy Warhol's eighties blind date club; her brief moment of celebrity as an elderly teenage extra in a ZZ Top video; the day she tested mentally retarded on an IQ test; and many other revealing tales of New York life, including its parties, its restaurants, and its fashion. Janowitz gives us her unique lowdown on her 1990s conversion from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on hairless dogs and ferrets, babies, the outer boroughs, big hair days, and bad hair days."Area Code 212" is filled with idiosyncratic delights and oddities of New York's wittiest social chroniclers, Tama Janowitz. Included in this book is her hilarious account of Andy Warhol's eighties blind date club; her brief moment of celebrity as an elderly teenage extra in a ZZ Top video; the day she tested mentally retarded on an IQ test; and many other revealing tales of New York life, including its parties, its restaurants, and its fashion. Janowitz gives us her unique lowdown on her 1990s conversion from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on hairless dogs and ferrets, babies, the outer boroughs, big hair days, and bad hair days.
About the Author
Tama Janowitz exploded into the literary scene in 1986 with her bestselling sexy book,
Slaves of New York. Her most recent novel is
Peyton Amberg. Janowitz’s work has appeared in many publications, including
The New Yorker,
Vogue, the
New York Times Op-Ed page, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.