Perhaps all of Jonathan Ames problems and the genesis of this hilarious book can be traced back to the late onset of his puberty. After all it can t be easy to be sixteen with a hairless undistinguishable from that of a five year old s.
This wonderfully entertaining memoir is a touching and humorous look at life in New York City. But this is life for an author who can proclaim my first sexual experience was rather old-fashioned: it was with a prostitute an author who can talk about his desire to be a model for the Hair Club for Men and about meeting his son for the first time.
Often...

Jonathan Ames's acclaimed fictional odyssey inside New York City's sexual underground is the first novel from this arresting and original writer. Bleakly funny, fiercely moving, this starkly rendered chronicle of a young man's secret life is both unforgettable and "unabashedly shocking" (Vanity Fair).

When Alexander Vine finishes his work day, he leaves his post as a doorman at Manhattan's exclusive Four Seasons restaurant -- and enters a nighttime landscape of chance and danger, excitement and reinvention in the city's erotic underworld. Walking a tightrope between sexual desire and...

Jonathan Ames has drawn comparisons across the literary spectrum, from David Sedaris to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Woody Allen to P.G. Wodehouse, and his books, as well as his abilities as a performer, have made him a favorite on the Late Show with David Letterman. Whether he's chasing deranged cockroaches around his apartment, kissing a beautiful actress on the set of an avant-garde film, finding himself stuck perilously on top of a fence in Memphis in the middle of the night, or provoking fights with huge German men, Jonathan Ames has an uncanny knack for getting himself into outlandish...

But who could describe my fright when, on the next morning, I awoke and found myself feeling as if completely changed into a woman. Case 129, Autobiography, from Psychopathia Sexualis, a Medico-Forensic Study by Richard Von Krafft-Ebing
At the time the passage above was written, people who felt trapped in the wrong gender automatically became case-studies. Today they become the men and women they always felt they were. Transsexuals test our notions of what it is to be male or female and, more provocatively, what it means to be one self as opposed to another. Their stories, says...

My Less Than Secret Life is the companion volume to Jonathan Ames's first memoirish endeavor, "the mildly perverted and wildly amusing" (Vanity Fair) What's Not to Love? This collection of the cult author's fiction and essays includes Ames's public diary, the bi-weekly columns he penned for the New York Press. The entries of this diary are a record of his mad adventures: his ill-fated debut as an amateur boxer fighting as The Herring Wonder', a faltering liaison with a Cuban prostitute, his public outing of George Plimpton as a Jew, his discussion with Eve Ensler about his dear friend The...

Wildly original novelist, essayist, and performance artist Jonathan Aames delivers his best collection yet--a hilarious, risque, and loveable selection of articles, essays, and fiction, including several previously unpublished pieces.With an HBO pilot based on this collection's centerpiece ("Bored to Death"), his two hilarious novels, The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir , in development as films (with screenplays by Mr. Ames), a critically acclaimed graphic novel, The Alcoholic, under his belt, and an ongoing series of literary and not-so-literary stunts, Jonathan Ames has proven himself to be a...