The Fran Lebowitz Reader

by Fran Lebowitz

Book Overview

In the vein of Lebowitz's acclaimed Netflix limited series, Pretend It's a City--The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together two of the famed author's bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies.

In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life--its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679761802
• ISBN13: 9780679761808
• Release Date: November 1994
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The best in

Fran Lebowitz's "The Fran Lebowitz Reader" is a must for anyone interested in the best in "urban cool" writing. Lebowitz is unusual in being an American humorist of the barbed--not warm and fuzzy, like Erma Bombeck--variety. She lays on the sarcasm and the weary, I've-seen-it-all attitude a little thick at times, but hey, this woman was born in the wrong era and you can't blame her for that. Picture Dorothy Parker come back to life with a fleshier face and uncooperative hair and you have a decent picture of Lebowitz.I can't resist quoting. Some of these are classics that you may be surprised to learn came from Lebowitz:"My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."* * *"There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death."* * *"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable."* * *"[In grade school,] I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey."* * *"Polite conversation is rarely either."* * *"The only appropriate reply to the queston, 'Can I be frank?' is 'Yes, if I can be Barbara.' "* * *"Looking genuinely attentive is like sawing a girl in half and then putting her back together. It is seldom achieved without the use of mirrors."* * *Well, I could go on and on, clearly, but I'll stop quoting if only just to say that this is the kind of sophisticated humor book you can devour in one gulp--or pace yourself and enjoy it slowly and luxuriously, like nibbling away at a particularly fine bittersweet chocolate mousse. Despite the occasional reference which dates these pieces to their 1970s origin (such as instructions for disco behavior), most of the essays hold up amazingly well because they do the time-honored humorist trick of commenting on basic human foibles. This is a delightful, subversive book.

Frantastic!

Absolutely uproarious! By the second page, I was on the floor nearly asphixiating from laughter. Lebowitz has an innate flair for striking the funny bone with a combination of a purposefully erudite tone and an unapolgetically self-oriented perspective. Not for the dull-witted.

Fantabulous

I got this book for Christmas, and I read it in 1 day. I simply couldn't put it down. Since reading it, however, I have experienced some rather strange side effects, the most dangerous of which involves the blurting out of random Franian quotes on innocent bystanders. However, reading the book is well worth the risk involved. Fran Lebowitz is the most intelligent writer alive today. Too bad she isn't also the most prolific. Where are you, Fran? We want more!

great book

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