Slaves of New York (Picador Books) [Paperback]

'Janowitz is a fearless writer. Her details are quirky, her language is lean and her sentences sprint along with deceptive ease' New York Times 'The shrewd observation, the skewed invention ... are the gifts of a singular talent' Jay McInerney 'Brilliantly funny' Independent 'Laugh-out loud funny ... wonderful' Washington Post --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

‘Brilliantly funny’ --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

‘Laugh-out loud funny ... wonderful’ --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

'A fascinating, and fascinated, chronicler of the dystopian metropolis' --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

So savagely witty, so acerbic, so piercingly accurate. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Meet the denizens of New York City: artists, prostitutes, saints, and seers. All are aspiring toward either fame or oblivion, and hoping for love and acceptance. Instead they find high rents, faithless partners, and dead-end careers. But between the disappointments come snatches of self-awareness, and a strange beauty in their encounters with one another. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Tama Janowitz writes for numerous periodicals including the New Yorker and Elle. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her brutish, handsome husband, malevolent, adorable child, and two six-pound, partially hairless dogs, one of whom is crazy. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

After I became a prostitute, I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size. Some large, others quite shriveled and pendulous of testicle. Some blue-veined and reeking of Stilton, some miserly. Some crabbed, enchanted, dusted with pearls like the great minarets of the Taj Mahal, jesting penises, ringed as the tail of a racoon, fervent, crested, impossible to live with, marigold-scented. More and more I became grateful I didn't have to own one of these appendages.
Of course I had a pimp; he wasn't an ordinary sort of person but he had a double Ph. D candidate in philosophy and American literature at the University of Masachusetts. When we first became friends he was driving a taxicab, but soon found this left him little time for his own work, which was to write.
When my job as script girl for a German-produced movie to be filmed in Venezuela fell through, it became obvious we were going to have to figure out a different way to make money fast. For a pimp and a prostitute, Bob and I had a very unusual relationship. As far as his role went, he could have cared less. But I didn't mind; I paid the bills, bought his ribbons, and then if I felt like handing over any extra money to him, it was up to me. At night I would come in for a rest and find him lying on the bed reading Kant, or Heidegger's "What Is a Thing?"
Often our discussions would be so lengthy and intense I would have to gently interrupt him to say that if I didn't get back out to work the evening would be over and I wouldn't have filled my self-imposed nightly quota. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.