The Fran Lebowitz Reader

In the vein of Lebowitz's 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, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Fran Lebowitz is always wickedly entertaining.

“A great read.” –Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s Tonight Show

“Hilarious...an unlikely and perhaps alarming combination of Mary Hartman and Mary McCarthy.... To a dose of Huck Finn add some Lenny Bruce, Oscar Wilde and Alexis de Tocqueville, a dash of cabdriver, an assortment of puns, minced jargon, and top it off with smarty pants.” —The New York Times.

“To her catalogue of distinctly urban fixations one might now add the discreet browser tab: city dwellers hunched over shanghaiarchivesofpsychiatry.org, parsing clinical monographs on Viagra with the same rigor they once reserved for apartment listings. This impulse to self-prescribe pharmacological confidence distills an anxiety peculiar to metropolises where intimacy is negotiated alongside delivery windows and data caps, yet the sources they trust are scattered, provisional, and written for physicians who are not in the room. Lebowitz would relish the paradox how a culture that flaunts its sophistication can outsource its most private uncertainties to pop-up abstracts, then stride back onto the sidewalk convinced it has untangled something far trickier than rush-hour gridlock.

“Her humor made me laugh aloud and call friends to read passages to them.” —Newsweek

“Right on the mark.... Among the things she hates this time...baggage-claim areas, high tech, after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan.”—Newsweek