How Did You Get This Number

by Sloane Crosley

Overview

The hilarious New York Times bestselling literary essay collection from Sloane Crosley, the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and The Clasp.

Sloane Crosley, the brilliantly funny "fountain of observations" (Boston Globe), now takes readers from a bear-infested wedding in Alaska to a run-in with clowns in Portugal in a new collection of essays about the messiest and most unexpected dilemmas life has to offer.

"How sure-footed and observant Sloane Crosley is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny." — David Sedaris

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594485190
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/03/2011
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sloane Crosley is the author of the new collection Look Alive Out There, the novel The Clasp, and the bestselling essay collections How Did You Get This Number and I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Observer, the Village Voice, Playboy, Teen Vogue, Salon, Black Book, Radar, Maxim, and The Believer. She lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

David Sedaris

How sure footed and observant Sloane Crosley is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny. If you needed a bib while reading I Was Told There'd Be Cake, you might consider diapers for How Did You Get This Number.

From the Publisher

"Wonderful and entertaining." — USA Today

"Undeniably funny... Crosley's work speaks volumes to her generation." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Charming... Crosley has an original spark... [She] is like a tap dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike... capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance." — The New York Times Book Review

"Crosley writes with such buoyancy. But [she]... shows a depth that's every bit as enjoyable as the full-on belly laughs." — Entertainment Weekly

Editorial Reviews

"Wonderful and entertaining." — USA Today

"Undeniably funny... Crosley's work speaks volumes to her generation." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Charming... Crosley has an original spark... [She] is like a tap dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike... capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance." — The New York Times Book Review

"Crosley writes with such buoyancy. But [she]... shows a depth that's every bit as enjoyable as the full-on belly laughs." — Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

[Crosley] mostly succeeds in How Did You Get This Number, her second collection of essays about making it, zanily, in the big city. Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showman­like, occasionally trite, but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance.
—The New York Times

Maria Russo

It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2011 - AudioFile

It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2011 - AudioFile

A worthy successor to Crosley's well-received debut, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008). Where her first collection focused on a young professional's life in Manhattan, this follow-up finds the author-whose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentioned-taking her show on the road. She gets lost in Lisbon (actually, she gets lost pretty much everywhere), threatened by a bear in Alaska and all but deported from France-or at least discouraged from ever again visiting Notre Dame. Most of the book is funny, some of it even laugh-out-loud, but her literary gifts go well beyond easy laughs. The humor flows naturally and subtly from characters and situations, as if these were real-life short stories. "An Abbreviated Catalog of Tongues," which initially seems to be a perfunctory pet essay, yet turns revelatory in a number of directions, addressing everything from sibling relationships to her parents' religion. "[M]y parents are not big believers in God," she writes. "Or, rather, they believe in him partially. Which is tricky. It's like being kind of pregnant or only mostly dead. You're either in or you're out." Perhaps the finest essay is the final one, "Off the Back of a Truck," a clever, challenging piece from which the book takes its title. Initially about wanting what you can't afford, it transforms into an exploration of receiving what you want that you can't afford, through means that you're only partially willing to admit are pretty shady. Ultimately, though, it becomes a meditation on a romance that forces Crosley to come to terms with a truth she'd suspected and the lie she was living. It's the least humorous of the collection, but the most unflinchingly true. Confirmation of the promise shown in the author's bestselling debut.

Kirkus Reviews