It Takes a Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City

Finalist for the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humora Rocky Mountain News (Denver) Best Book of the Year

Millions of people dream of abandoning the city routine for a simple country life. Jim Mullen was not one of them. He loved his Manhattan existence: parties, openings, movie screenings. He could walk to hundreds of restaurants, waste entire afternoons at the Film Forum, people-watch from his window. Then, one day, calamity.

His wife quits smoking and buys a weekend house in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York -- in a tiny town diametrically opposed to Manhattan in every way. Slowly, however, the man who once boasted, "Life is just a cab away," begins to warm to the place -- manure and compost and strangers who wave and all -- and to embrace the kind of life that once gave him the shakes.

Jim Mullen writes the "Hot Sheet" column for Entertainment Weekly and has also written for The New York Times, New York magazine, and The Village Voice.