Run Catch Kiss by Amy Sohn (1999, Hardcover)
From New York's most popular alternative-press columnist comes Run Catch Kiss, a sharp and irresistible novel of love, sex, scandal, and the pursuit of a boyfriend. After graduating from Brown University, saucy, vivacious Ariel Steiner returns to her native New York City to become an actress and take the world by storm. Buoyed by daydreams of winning an Oscar, Ariel is determined to barrel into the limelight as Hollywood's hottest ingenue, and nothing can stand in her way -- nothing, that is, but her freshman fifteen pounds, a senile talent agent, and the fact that she's living with her parents in Brooklyn and sleeping in her childhood bedroom. After nearly landing a TV role as "a chunky young woman who works as a cashier and studies part-time at City College," Ariel is forced to face facts: she's got a long way to go before rocketing to stardom. Living on a coffee, yogurt, and skinless chicken diet and temping for the "Corposhit" in a dingy, claustrophobic office, Ariel awaits her break. When she lands the title role in a rock-musical version of Lolita, she discovers a hidden talent for channeling her erotic fantasies and soon thereafter finds a job as a sex columnist at City Week, New York's hottest downtown weekly. Before long, Ariel's tell-all tales of bad dates with junkies, commitmentphobes, and manic-depressives begin to wreak havoc on her life. The hate mail rolls in, along with sticky crush letters, and her parents learn far more about her than they ever wanted to know. When the objects of her affection realize that they may become subjects of her next steamy column, some refuse to have anything to do with her, while others beg for their fifteen minutes of fame. But when Ariel finally falls in love, her "material" takes on a new, er, passion that even she couldn't imagine, and she must decide who she really is: a nice Jewish girl who wants to settle down, or a brazen sex kitten who'd rather meet a deadline than the man of her dreams. Hilarious and wise, Run Catch Kiss is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the voyeuristic and avaricious culture that created that dangerous nineties phenomenon: the single girl who wants it all.
When Ariel Steiner returns to her New York City home to pursue her acting career, she is faced with the reality of a very serious identity crisis.
Industry Reviews
"It is a clever and witty book, but it is also more a collection of fragments, held together by a slender strand of plot, than a fully formed novel....Ms. Sohn doesn't have much to say even as she recycles herself as material, no longer for a sex column but for a sex novel. At the end of the century, after Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Erica Jong and others who have exploited the sexual confessional mode, she seems not only imitative but palely imitative as well."
New York Times - Richard Bernstein (08/20/1999)
"One reads Amy Sohn's gleefully exhibitionist 'Female Trouble' column in the giveaway New York Press...with equal parts astonished admiration and mounting horror at the calculated brazenness of it all. The same could be said of Sohn's comic first novel...."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Mark Rozzo (08/01/1999)
"Sohn has a deft hand with dialogue; many of Ariel's lines are laugh-out-loud funny....But...RUN CATCH KISS is a frivolous read that's far more titillating than scintillating."
Entertainment Weekly - Clarissa Cruz (07/30/1999)
Condition: Book and book cover in good condition
