I Love You More Than You Know: Essays - Softcover

Ames, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080217017X ISBN 13: 9780802170170

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2005

Synopsis

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 situations. In his latest collection, I Love You More Than You Know, Ames proves once again his immense talent for turning his own adventures, neuroses, joys, heartaches, and insights into profound and hilarious tales. Alive with love and tenderness for his son, his parents, his great-aunt — and even strangers in bars late at night — in I Love You More Than You Know Ames looks beneath the surface of our world to find the beauty in the perverse, the sweetness in loneliness, and the humor in pain.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Novelist and humorist Ames writes: "My whole oeuvre has become one big dysfunctional personal ad," and this uneven collection of essays often feels that way. Ames (Wake Up, Sir!) informs readers several times of his height/weight vital stats. He is straight, but with a pansexual horniness that leads to inopportune erections, sordid encounters with prostitutes and an s&m session with a dominatrix and her transsexual boyfriend that makes him late for a play date with his son. He forthrightly, indeed obsessively, discloses details of his chronic rectal itch, his "explosive episodes of Irritable Bowel Syndrome" and every other gross bodily eruption and excretion that plagues him. And there's a note of self-deprecatory preening as Ames marvels at the young lovelies he still manages to attract and the other celebrity writers he hangs with on his book tours. Sometimes Ames's trademark combination of (literal) bathroom gags, hipster grotesquerie and neurotic free association achieves an inspired synthesis of confessional humor, but with overuse its hilarity and freshness decays into a lazy reliance on shock effects and embarrassment laughs. When Ames manages to wrench his gaze from his navel (and other orifices) and connect with outside reality, his prose sparkles with offhand comic insights. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 080217017X
• ISBN 13: 9780802170170
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288