Run Catch Kiss: A Gratifying Novel [Hardcover]

Amy Sohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 1999

I was only twenty-two and already I was infamous....

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amy Sohn lives in New York, where she writes a raunchy column for the New York Press called "Female Trouble." Her first novel features a young woman named Ariel Steiner, who lives in New York and writes a raunchy column called "Run Catch Kiss" for City Week. Any other similarities between author and creation are, no doubt, purely accidental. We first meet Ariel the summer after her graduation from college when she returns to the city, ready to resume the acting career she had as a child. Unfortunately, college not only enlarged Ariel's mind--it had a broadening effect on her body as well. "I can't send you out for any ingenue parts until you lose fifteen pounds," her agent tells her. Ariel is sure this won't take long and indulges in an optimistic fantasy about the fame and fortune that will soon come her way once she's lost the weight--an appearance in a George C. Wolfe production; a walk-on in a George Clooney film; an Oscar-winning performance in a Woody Allen movie, complete with requisite Oscar fantasy: "I'd bring my father as my date, and when Jack Palance opened the envelope and announced me as the winner, I'd run up to the stage in a strapless Chanel and they'd cut to a shot of my dad drowning in a sea of his own mucus." But until the day when Ariel Steiner becomes the third part of a Hollywood girl-triumvirate comprised of herself, Gwyneth, and Winona, a girl's got to eat; and so begins a ribaldly picaresque journey from actress wannabe to infamous New York sex columnist--"the Hester Prynne of downtown."

Run Catch Kiss is a novel that will appeal to a very specific audience--fans of Amy Sohn; young college graduates who'd like to imagine it's really this easy to achieve notoriety in a city like New York; and readers who enjoy lots of name-dropping, club-hopping, and frank descriptions of sex and other bodily functions. Sohn includes several of Ariel's columns ("Stench of a Woman," for example, or "Smutlife") as well as the letters she gets in response. In between, Ariel and her cronies and assorted one-night stands hang out in places with names like BarF and BarBarella, and drop pop references to Gen-X movies and music. Sohn delivers it all up with moxie, making up for the novel's literary weaknesses by sheer full-frontal outrageousness. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

Life imitates art for a 22-year-old downtown Manhattan sex columnist in Sohn's raunchy, scathing and slippery debut. Ariel Steiner, an aspiring actress, sexpot and self-described failure, retreats to her parents' Brooklyn Heights home the summer after graduating from Brown. Scrambling in vain for a glamorous career and boyfriend, she settles for a temp secretary job to a woman she calls "Corposhit," using lunch hour to audition for "fat-girl" parts (she never lost her "freshman fifteen" pounds). The heroine has chutzpah, though, a quality that wins her the title role in a tacky musical, Lolita: Rock On, and humiliating dates with unsavory men. Fed up with the "overall suck quotient" of her summer, she submits a blow-by-blow account of her sexual frustrations to a downtown weekly paper and is instantly offered a column, entitled "Run Catch Kiss"Aa kind of "perils of Pauline from a slacker slut perspective." The newspaper is modeled on the actual New York Press, for which Sohn writes a similar column, and this novel retreads much of that material. Ariel enjoys a kind of creepy, thrilling notoriety, replete with fan and hate mail, until she begins embellishing her stories to compensate for her real-life love doldrums and runs into trouble with the newspaper's management. Sohn's writing, with its graphic sex, can be smug or comical, but she's best when imperious snugglebunny Ariel lets her guard down and confronts her humiliations with honesty and pluck. The portrait of Ariel's parents is sympathetic, even witty, in contrast to her mostly narcissistic goofball boyfriends. Sohn's take on the Gen-X dating scene mirrors her skewering of showbiz and journalism, and while readers may not believe that deep down Ariel is just a nice Jewish girl looking for love and success, many will agree that she's brash, smart, fearless and funny. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (July 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684853027
• ISBN-13: 978-0684853024
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,199,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Amy's new novel, Motherland, will be published in August 2012 by Simon & Schuster. Beyond that . . .
In 1973 Amy was born in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. Raised in Brooklyn Heights, Amy went on to attend Hunter College High School in Manhattan, alma mater of Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan. In 1995 Amy was graduated from Brown University, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and with Honors.
In 1995 Amy returned to Brooklyn to pursue a career as an actress. It didn't go well, though she did appear in an episode of "Law and Order" for forty seconds, an episode for which she still receives residuals. In 1996 she became a columnist at New York Press, writing her autobiographical "Female Trouble" column, a chronicle of dating below Fourteenth Street that elicited loads of invective from readers and shamed her parents at dinner parties. This column was satirized in a cartoon by Anthony Haden-Guest that featured a blond and brunette talking, with the brunette telling the blond, "I'm the new you." This was thought to be based on Amy and Candace Bushnell, though Anthony never admitted it outright.
In 1999, Simon & Schuster published Amy's first novel, Run Catch Kiss, which has since been translated into four languages. According to the New York Times review of the book, "A little-known event that took place around the time that Richard M. Nixon was resigning as President was the birth of Amy Sohn, who has emerged as a representative of her generation." The review included the word "concomitant," "concupiscence," and "Spenglerian," three words that do not appear in the novel.
In 1999 Amy became a columnist at the New York Post, where she enraged management by comparing Mayor Giuliani to Hitler and writing an expose on the Yankees locker room. In 2000, Amy co-created, wrote and starred in a television show for Oxygen's "X Chromosome" animated series entitled "Avenue Amy."
In August 2001 Amy landed at New York magazine. At New York, her columns mirrored the trajectory of her life, from "Naked City" to "Mating" to "Breeding." In 2004 Simon & Schuster published her second novel, My Old Man, about a May-December relationship between a rabbinical school dropout and an aging screenwriter. It took place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
In 2008 she became a columnist at England's Grazia magazine, where she wrote a column called "Diary of a Recessionista." The recession soon took over and the column was axed. Over the years, Amy has also written for Harper's Bazaar, Premiere, Playboy, Elle, The New York Times, and Details. She is a recipient of a reader award from Playboy called the Golden Bunny and was voted one of Park Slope's 100 most influential people. She is certain she is the only individual to have received both honors.
In 2009 Simon & Schuster published Amy's third novel, Prospect Park West, about four Park Slope mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was translated into five languages.
As a pundit on popular culture, she has appeared on such networks as VH1, MTV, Fox News, CNN, Lifetime, MSNBC, and PBS. She has written television pilots for ABC, Fox, Lifetime and most recently, HBO and Sarah Jessica Parker, who optioned Prospect Park West. She has written two films, a Gen X Big Chill called Spin the Bottle, and a Gen X horror film called Pagans.
She grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives today. She has a brother, five years younger. She voted for Barack Obama and raised money for him. Her favorite writers are Laurie Colwin, Hilma Wolitzer, Charles Bukowski, Nathanael West, Mary Gaitskill, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Her favorite films include Gregory's Girl, The Landlord, The Apartment, My Life as a Dog, and Together.
She had her seventh birthday party at Kramer versus Kramer but not all the children were permitted by their parents to come. As a child she was taken to the films Heartland, Splash, Heart Like a Wheel, The Magical Mystery Tour, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday and is glad about it. She thinks Wainwright elevates Apatow and not the other way around. She has strong biceps but weak abs. She is aware that her inspiration for this list was the Kevin Costner speech in Bull Durham. She has had sexual fantasies about Richard Ford and they were productive.
If she could switch careers she would be a Broadway musical theater producer or a sommelier. She dresses to the left. She believes that when it comes to hair highlights, cheap is expensive. Her favorite joke is, "What's the difference between a Jew and a Gentile? A Gentile leaves without saying goodbye and a Jew says goodbye without leaving." She also enjoys a very tasteless Katharine Hepburn joke whose punchline is, "How do you turn it off?" Her favorite candy is York Peppermint Patties and she always has a knot in the same section of her hair when she wakes up. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
Like her at www.facebook.com/amysohn and visit her at www.amysohn.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, July 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Run Catch Kiss: A Gratifying Novel (Hardcover)

I read great reviews and read this book in a couple of days, but was somewhat disappointed, expecting something more...the premise was promising, but I couldn't work up much feeling for the character. Talk about self-absorbed, imagining the whole city was aghast over her column? I think not! Unerotic pointless sex scenes, over and over...let me tell you, if you want to read a good book about a single Jewish gal yearning for love and marriage, go to the library and get out "Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York City". A wonderful funny touching novel about a young woman in a New York that is no more, but much better written (not to be confused with a horrible movie by the same name). "Run Catch Kiss" confirms two things, a) that men can put their you know whats in anything and its no more than a sneeze, and b) I am so very glad I'm not a young woman living in New York.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No stars for this trash, March 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Run Catch Kiss: A Gratifying Novel (Hardcover)

This was boring, remarkably UNsexy and terribly written. It is below Jackie Collins in storytelling. The whole thing was so awful-I couldn't finish it. I was, however, compelled to write my first Amazon review!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Trashy Low grade Porn, February 11, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Run Catch Kiss: A Gratifying Novel (Hardcover)

Not to mention boring. Ariel comes across as obnoxious and self-absorbed, the writing is flat, and the subject matter is banal. Run, Drop, Spit on this clunker.