The Fran Lebowitz Reader [Paperback]

Fran Lebowitz (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 8, 1994 | Series: Vintage

Fran Lebowitz in
Public Speaking
A Martin Scorsese Picture
Now an HBO® Documentary Film

The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together in one volume, with a new preface, two bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, by an "important humorist in the classic tradition" (The New York Times Book Review) who is "the natural successor to Dorothy Parker" (British Vogue). 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, she is always wickedly entertaining.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

They say that age brings wisdom--or resignedness, at least--but every time you see Fran Leibowitz, she's just as hangdog as ever. Hey, Fran, how about writing a few more humor columns? That'll cheer you up! Or maybe not, but until she writes more columns, we'll have to make do with The Fran Leibowitz Reader. This paperback collects her two bestsellers of the 1970s into one volume, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. Back then, her books defined knowing, urban cool. Guess what? They still do. If you were a mite too young to appreciate Leibowitz's take on that libertine decade the first time around ("Notes on Trick," anyone?), now is an excellent time to make her acquaintance. The pieces still hold up as good writing and deliver plenty of sharp laughs. Would that we had her jaundiced take on the '90s, which could use some Leibowitz-style deflating. Come back, Fran! Come back!

Review

On METROPOLITAN LIFE
"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

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

On SOCIAL STUDIES
"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

"Unique.... Lebowitz offers vocational guides for aspiring heiresses, popes, empresses; manuals for landlords; guidance to the rich who wish to meet the poor." —Vogue

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 333 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (November 8, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679761802
• ISBN-13: 978-0679761808
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 67 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The best in July 26, 2002

By Catherine S. Vodrey

Format:Paperback

Fran Lebowitz's "The Fran Lebowitz Reader" is a must for anyone interested in the best in "urban cool" writing. Lebowitz is unusual in being an American humorist of the barbed--not warm and fuzzy, like Erma Bombeck--variety. She lays on the sarcasm and the weary, I've-seen-it-all attitude a little thick at times, but hey, this woman was born in the wrong era and you can't blame her for that. Picture Dorothy Parker come back to life with a fleshier face and uncooperative hair and you have a decent picture of Lebowitz.

I can't resist quoting. Some of these are classics that you may be surprised to learn came from Lebowitz:

"My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."

* * *

"There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death."

* * *

"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable."

* * *

"[In grade school,] I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey."

* * *

"Polite conversation is rarely either."

* * *

"The only appropriate reply to the queston, 'Can I be frank?' is 'Yes, if I can be Barbara.' "

* * *

"Looking genuinely attentive is like sawing a girl in half and then putting her back together. It is seldom achieved without the use of mirrors."

* * *

Well, I could go on and on, clearly, but I'll stop quoting if only just to say that this is the kind of sophisticated humor book you can devour in one gulp--or pace yourself and enjoy it slowly and luxuriously, like nibbling away at a particularly fine bittersweet chocolate mousse.

Despite the occasional reference which dates these pieces to their 1970s origin (such as instructions for disco behavior), most of the essays hold up amazingly well because they do the time-honored humorist trick of commenting on basic human foibles. This is a delightful, subversive book.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars LANDLORDS, URBAN OLYMPICS, er, CB RADIOS, MOOD RINGS, etc December 30, 2002

By adam david

Format:Paperback

Look, anyone who can proclaim that their idea of exercise is having to light their own cigarette has got my vote.

There are some brilliant pieces in here, but there is no question that they were of a time. The selections from Metropolitan Life work best for me; they are, as one would've said in '70s Manhattan, "a stitch". Still, I can't imagine even a modern new yorker not being able to identify greatly with some of these insights and witticisms. Kind of like the movie Arthur, it evokes a different time but you'll still be able to recognize all the people and feelings. And it's damn, damn funny.

As another reviewer begged, come back Fran, we need to read what you have to say about today's anti-smoking, anti-dancing, anti-livable, post-Giuliani town.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Modern Wit August 4, 2005

By J. Buller

Format:Paperback

I first read Fran Lebowitz's delightful essays back in the late 70s and early 80s when they were fresh, new, and exciting. Recently in a mood for just her insightful, ironic take on the world again, I dug out my dog-eared copies of METROPOLITAN LIFE and SOCIAL STUDIES only to find ... that they're just as fresh, new, and exciting today as they were then.

Fran Lebowitz falls both into the tradition of great humorist essayists like H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker and of social satirists like Juvenal and Horace. She doesn't suffer fools gladly but, despite what other reviewers have said below, she doesn't suffer them unkindly either. In fact, I came across the current book as I was searching this web site desperately hoping that she had published another book after her two great earlier triumphs, and I was stunned to see the bile and venom emitted by some of the reviewers. Fran Lebowitz is FUNNY. (I mean, laugh-out-loud funny.) She's SATIRICAL. There is absolutely nothing in her works at which to be offended (seriously).

Her take on the world is that of a slightly world-weary urban sophisticate. It probably doesn't hurt that this is a style I particularly admire or that so many of her views reflect my own. (She had me at "The outdoors is what you have to go through to get from the apartment into the taxi.")

The essays in this book are terrifically written, models of wit and good style, admirably concise, and still pertinent today.