"I consider every moment of my life spent unaware of the existence of novelist Tama Janowitz a complete and utter waste of consciousness...I would build a city of pearl and onyx for Tama Janowitz with my own raw and useless hands."
-- Mallory Ortberg, The Toast
From the bestselling author of Slaves of New York comes a hilarious, clear-eyed, satiric novel about the sad plight of a misguided woman on the make in Manhattan. Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins is an "aging filly-about-town"--still beautiful enough to be (sometimes) invited to the best parties and the right restaurants, but unmarried and rapidly going broke. In her world, marriage to a wealthy man is all that can save her, although Florence's hard-hearted search for security and status takes her on an inevitable downward spiral.
New York "society novels" at the turn of the nineteenth century gave us a piercing look at the world and rituals of the city's wealthy; Janowitz here casts that tradition in a fresh light, giving us a tirn-of-the-century society novel that demonstrates how little seems to have changed. In a sly and unforgettable portrait of New York's haute monde, Janowitz brilliantly evokes a young woman's struggle for love and survival in the city that is as unforgiving today as it was a hundred years ago.
“If there’s anything Tama Janowitz knows about, it’s the sheer savagery of our most chic and ultra-sophisticated social arrangements.” – The New York Times Book Review
“Her best ever.” – Harper’s Bazaar
“Janowitz has penned a brutal update of Edith Wharton’s The house of Mirth, accurately analyzing the social codes and economic hierarchy that functions in the New York she knows, as Wharton did a century ago.” – Detour
“A scathing satire…Janowitz takes a shredder to New York City’s crème de la crème.” – Philadelphia City Paper
“A sharp-tongued and funny writer.” – Chicago Tribune
“Janowitz’s writing comes out of a tradition of comic American misantghropy that can be traced back to Twain, passing along the way through such intervening figures as Dreiser, Nathanael West, and the author of whom she is most reminiscent, Ring Lardner.” – New York Newsday
“Tama still has her knack for homing in on our worst fears and behavior, and initially, you feel like you can’t relate to Florence. Then you realize you only hope you can’t relate.” – Jane
“[Florence’s] steady decline down the social ladder she so desperately want to climb is the stuff of black humor.” – Manhattan File
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