Behind the Book Reading Series

Join us for a diverting evening at KGB Bar for the Behind the Book Reading Series as Jonathan Ames and Thomas Beller regale us with their comic wit and elegant prose.

When: Thursday, March 9, 2006, from 7:00-9:00pm
Where: KGB Bar, 85 E 4th Street;
(between Second and Third Aves.; take the F/V to Second Ave. or the No. 6 to Astor Place
Contact: www.kgbbar.com or 212-505-3360
Admission free.

RSVP (Optional) to readingseries@behindthebook.org.

WHO:
Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, and the essay collections What's Not to Love?, My Less Than Secret Life, and I Love You More Than You Know. He is also the editor of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man are in development as films, with Mr. Ames writing the screenplays. He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a former columnist for New York Press. Mr. Ames performs frequently as a storyteller and comedian and has been a recurring guest on the Late Show with David Letterman.

Thomas Beller is the author of three books, Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist, and How To Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, and editor of three anthologies. He is a co-founder and editor of Open City Magazine and Books, and creator of the websites, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and Mapsites.net. His short stories, essays, and reportage have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, New York, The Village Voice, Spin, Vogue, Slate, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

REVIEWS: Jonathan Ames

For I Love You More Than You Know
The world is sick, imbalanced, and lunatic, according to storyteller/comedian Ames (I Pass Like Night), a self-described crooked literary clown….While not all readers will appreciate the oddball humor, Ames is a fine contemporary writer not to be ignored.
— Library Journal

For Wake Up, Sir!
In the same way that The Sopranos and the Analyze This movies mine the humor found at the intersection of the talking cure and tough-guy omerta, Ames's book pits the self-lacerating gush of alcoholism-in-transition against the cool detachment of the English hospitality industry; Wake Up, Sir! is a Wodehouse novel for the recovery era.
— Henry Alford, The New York Times

Alan Blair is a ne’er-do-well New Jerseyite who has failed to follow his first novel, ‘I Pity I,’ published seven years ago, with a second. At thirty, he’s alcoholic, afraid of confronting the bellicose uncle with whom he lives, and would be penniless but for an accident settlement. His most treasured possessions are a collection of dubious sports coats and a valet, who just happens to be named Jeeves. As you’d expect, Jeeves is circumspect, judicious, and ready at hand; what he may not be is real. Ames’s inventive romp follows its hero into very un-Wodehousian territory—an artists’ colony in upstate New York (based, in withering detail, on Yaddo), where the action revolves around art, sex, and larceny. But Jeeves remains faithful throughout; no amount of bad behavior can wring from him a sterner rejoinder than ‘Very strange, sir.’
— The New Yorker

In this bow to P.G. Wodehouse, Ames (The Extra Man) creates Alan Blair, a dapper, 30-year-old Jewish alcoholic novelist who's acquired ‘independent means’ in a recent insurance settlement. As befits a man of his station, he hires a personal valet named Jeeves. Not so befitting is his current living situation: he rooms with his aunt and uncle in Montclair, NJ, but they boot him out when he won't return to rehab. No matter; Alan has been accepted to an artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, NY (a lunatic asylum in disguise?). Despite his good intentions, Alan can't stay out of trouble, but Jeeves-always respectfully correct-is there to serve up advice. As no one else in the story acknowledges the valet, the reader wonders whether he exists outside Alan's mind. Ames's fourth novel strings readers along in a madcap adventure complete with a lively and varied set of characters. There is something for everyone here.
— Library Journal

For The Extra Man
Not since Harold and Maude has there been such a lovable odd couple as Louis Ives and Henry Harrison. Told in a lucid, diverting prose style, The Extra Man is a picaresque tale of a young man's sentimental education (in subjects ranging from tuxedo studs to trassexuals). In Henry Harrison, Jonathan Ames has created a truly memorable character.
— Jeffrey Eugenides

Jonathan Ames has always been one of my favorite contemporary writers, both for his limpid and elegant Lost Generation prose style and for his utterly fearless commitment to the most demanding psychosexual comedies. The Extra Man extends his accomplishments considerably. This is one of the most charming and alarming books of recent years.
— Rick Moody

The Extra Man is effervescently funny and stealthily heartbreaking. It’s also an extraordinary humane book that only Jonathan Ames could have written, and I can think of few other novels that, scene by scene, character by character, phrase by phrase, offer such intense, affecting pleasure. Louis Ives now joins the pantheon of my most beloved characters.
— Peter Cameron

The Extra Man wins us over with its sheer energy and good will, its confidence in the ability of its own humor and intelligence to widen our ideas about the possibilities of love.
— The New York Observer

[A] sure-footed exploration of sexual confusion and a . . .surprisingly moving urban comedy of manners. . . .Louis may feel as awkward as Milton Berle in drag but inside he's really Fred Astaire — he just doesn't know it yet.
— Stephanie Zacharek, The New York Times Book Review

For My Less than Secret Life
Brooklyn-based Ames's wild follow-up to What's Not to Love? is an entertaining salmagundi that tosses five short stories in among 42 essays, including past New York Press column installments, book reviews and e-zine contributions. A 1987 invitation to a nonexistent literary symposium sent Ames to a paranoid precipice, and his vivid, noir-style recollection of that mystery, The Nista Affair, makes a fine centerpiece. But the author is a man of appetites for sex, for self-examination, for performance, for weird experiences and this makes his book irresistible. He's like the dirtiest, smartest kid on the playground you might cringe, but you can't help being transfixed.
— Publishers Weekly

For What's Not to Love?
The publisher likens Ames's first nonfiction book to ‘a twisted man's version of Candace Bushnell's classic, Sex and the City.’ But that comparison does Ames a disservice. Not only can this novelist (I Pass the Night; The Extra Man) and former New York Press columnist (the book is a collection of his columns) write circles around Bushnell, as well as around Ames's fellow ex-Press sex columnist, Amy Sohn, but Ames's columns reveal a sweet, wide-open soul, despite their outre subject matter….There are strong echoes of Henry Miller here, in Ames's embrace of the human condition in all its variants, but Ames is his own man, his own writer (with an elegant, assured prose style)—and deserves hordes of his own fans.
— Publishers Weekly

Ames's prose is graceful...Like any good (albeit shticky) performer—Allen, Seinfeld, and a thousand Catskills comedians before them—Ames openly provokes the reader to have fun at his own expense...If you can handle this kind of intimacy with Jonathan Ames, you'll also find that he can be a pleasure, even through the stomach pain.
— Maya L. Kremen, The Village Voice

For I Pass Like Night
Jonathan Ames's acclaimed fictional odyssey inside New York City's sexual underground is the first novel from this arresting and original writer. Bleakly funny, fiercely moving, this starkly rendered chronicle of a young man's secret life is both unforgettable and ‘unabashedly shocking.’
— Vanity Fair

An authentic voice of youthful suffering. Mr. Ames's antisocial young hero comes through as a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS. The style is the real achievement: strong, clean, and poker-faced.
— Philip Roth

Cinematic in its short, graphic takes, chilling in its authority....A disturbing and often funny portrait of a man without illusions….a striking debut.
— Joyce Carol Oates

REVIEWS: Thomas Beller

For How To Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood
Editors' Choice of the New York Times Book Review

These quite marvelous and darkly hilarious personal essays derive their power from a shameless honesty, often about the most shameful moments, which suddenly reveal a luminous upside in the author's comic retelling.
— Phillip Lopate

Not since I first read Joseph Mitchell have I felt so vividly and beautifully transported to the streets of New York. Thomas Beller is a chronicler of his own life but also of the life of the city, and there's a quality of unbridled curiosity to his work which make his essays shimmer with comedy and insight and exuberance. I absolutely loved this book.
— Jonathan Ames

The best sections of his book…call to mind Raymond Carver in their clarity of language and subdued emotion. A fine collection of essays that will resonate with many.
— Publishers Weekly

A supremely enjoyable collection of essays written in clear, often very funny prose.
— Adrienne Day, Time Out New York

For The Sleep-Over Artist
A New York Times Notable Book of 2000. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2000.

A frank, likeable book with an appealing central character.
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Beller is a master of the profound and fatal flaw... poetry is everywhere.
— L.A. Times

Smart and funny. Beller has an admirable eye for detail, and a cutting observational wit.
— Deborah Picker, L.A. Weekly

Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions and betrayals, Beller's carefully crafted debut novel charts the coming-of-age of Alex Fader....Beller has the true novelist's knack for weaving together the disparate threads of postmodern urban existence into convincing studies of character. The vignettes of Alex's life coalesce into a moving portrait of a young man intuitively seeking a place he can call home.
— Publishers Weekly

In these tales of a young man growing up to encounter the confusions of modern masculinity, Thomas Beller has created a witty, observant and often very poignant bildungsroman for our time. Fresh, sophisticated and most of all utterly readable, The Sleep-Over Artist strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths.
— Eva Hoffman

For Seduction Theory: Stories
Touching and often funny...graced by elegant turns of phrase, a fresh way with metaphor and real insight. Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring ambivalence of youth.
— New York Times Book Review

‘Happiness is a solid and joy a liquid,’ quotes Beller from Salinger in the epigraph to this first collection, aptly setting the tone for 10 tales that shimmer with hope and a youthful, if somewhat callow, jouissance. Seldom is New York City as gentle a setting as in these tender, acutely observed stories of courtship, love and youthful rites of passage.
— Publishers Weekly

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