In this darkly funny, surprising memoir, the original “Lit Girl” and author of the era-defining Slaves of New York considers her life in and outside of New York City, from the heyday of the 1980s to her life today in a tiny upstate town that proves that fact is always stranger than fiction.
 With the publication of her acclaimed short story collection Slaves of New York, Tama Janowitz was crowned the Lit Girl of New York. Celebrated in rarified literary and social circles, she was hailed, alongside Mark Lindquist, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney, as one of the original “Brat Pack” writers—a wave of young minimalist authors whose wry, urbane sensibility captured the zeitgeist of the time, propelling them to the forefront of American culture.
In Scream, her first memoir, Janowitz recalls the quirky literary world of young downtown New York in the go-go 1980s and reflects on her life today far away from the city indelible to her work. As in Slaves of New York and A Certain Age, Janowitz turns a critical eye towards life, this time her own, recounting the vagaries of fame and fortune as a writer devoted to her art. Here, too, is Tama as daughter, wife, and mother, wrestling with aging, loss, and angst, both adolescent (her daughter) and middle aged (her own) as she cares for a mother plagued by dementia, battles a brother who questions her choices, and endures the criticism of a surly teenager.
Filled with a very real, very personal cast of characters, Scream is an intimate, scorching memoir rife with the humor, insight, and experience of a writer with a surgeon’s eye for detail, and a skill for cutting straight to the strangest parts of life.

SCREAM

Biographies & Memoirs

Janowitz, Tama.

Arts & Literature

HarperEnt

Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction

Dey Street Books

In her sizzling new novel, Tama Janowitz moves beyond the world of the single woman (Slaves of New York, A Certain Age), and now targets a young woman growing ever restless in her marriage, and ever hopeful that the next bed will produce someone more exciting. As she moves from man to man, Peyton Amberg slowly but surely loses her youthfulness, her good looks, even her sanity, as her paramours become rougher and the sex more dangerous. A savvy riff on the classic figure of Madam Bovary, Peyton Amberg is a caustic and brilliant satire of contemporary marriage as it is undermined by free-floating lust and exploits of a woman yearning for fulfillment outside of rigid societal structure. Peyton Amberg is nasty, funny, jaundiced, sarcastic, searingly honest, and mesmerizing from beginning to end.

Peyton Amberg: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

St.Martin's Press

Peyton Amberg is a young woman growing ever restless in her marriage, and ever hopeful that the next bed will produce someone more exciting. As she moves from man to man, she slowly but surely loses her youthfulness, her good looks, even her sanity, as her paramours become rougher and the sex more brutal. A savvy riff on the classic figure of Madame Bovary, Peyton Amberg is a caustic and brilliant satire of contemporary marriage, as it charts the free-floating lust and exploits of a woman yearning for fulfillment outside of rigid societal structure. Tama Janowitz's Peyton Amberg is nasty, funny, jaundiced, sarcastic, searingly honest, and mesmerizing from beginning to end.

St. Martin's: Griffin

Welcome to the wonderful world of Tama Janowitz, one of New York's wittiest social chroniclers. Area Code 212 is filled with idiosyncratic delights and oddities, including her hilarious account of Andy Warhol's 1980s blind date club; her brief moment of celebrity as an elderly teenage extra in a ZZ Top video; the day she tested mentally retarded on an IQ test; and many other revealing tales of New York life, including its parties, its restaurants, and its fashion. Janowitz gives us her unique lowdown on her 1990s conversion from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on observing the Twin Towers come down from her apartment roof, on hairless dogs and ferrets, babies, the outer boroughs, big-hair days and bad-hair days. Above all, the humor and insights of Area Code 212 will not only appeal to all of those who live in New York City, but also to those from around the country who have a fascination with what it is like to thrive in the urban mecca. Self-deprecating, funny, and touching, Area Code 212 is an irresistible collection of essays.

Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights

History

Area Code 212 is filled with idiosyncratic delights and oddities of New York's wittiest social chroniclers, Tama Janowitz. Included in this book is her hilarious account of Andy Warhol's eighties blind date club; her brief moment of celebrity as an elderly teenage extra in a ZZ Top video; the day she tested mentally retarded on an IQ test; and many other revealing tales of New York life, including its parties, its restaurants, and its fashion. Janowitz gives us her unique lowdown on her 1990s conversion from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on hairless dogs and ferrets, babies, the outer boroughs, big hair days, and bad hair days.

"Janowitz is a fearless writer. Her details are quirky, her language is lean and her sentences sprint along with deceptive ease. The protagonists in her stories share with her a shyness and a sense of always being out of place. Although they try in earnest to fit in, they put on the wrong clothes or say the wrong thing or fail to grasp the subtle messages other people send their way" - "New York Times". "The shrewd observation, the skewed invention are the gifts of a singular talent" - Jay McInerney.

Slaves of New York (Picador Books)

Contemporary

Washington Square Press

A Cannibal in Manhattan

London, Picador, 1988, 16mo brossura con copertina illustrata a colori, pp. (8)-288 con 31 illustrazioni f.t. e numerosi disegni (di Tony Wright) in nero n.t. (Tracce d'umido nelle prime pagine).

A CANNIBAL IN MANHATTAN.

Crown (1987)

Manhattan heiress Maria Fishburn returns from a vacation in the South Sea islands with a new fiance, Mgungu Yabba Mgungu, a former cannibal who becomes the toast of Manhattan

Cannibal In Manhattan (Picador Books)

When a woman reaches a certain age, the quest for a husband takes on a particular urgency--especially in certain tightly woven social circles. A Certain Age is a biting and masterful social satire from the bestselling author of Slaves of New York. Tama Janowitz created a literary sensation with her first book about New York and its slaves, establishing herself as one of the preeminent voices of her generation. Now, she returns with a wickedly funny and glisteningly dark novel that takes as its subject our current obsession with conspicuous consumption--especially in the form of one very misguided young woman, desperate to secure a mate and a certain lifestyle. When Florence Collins sets out on the jitney for a weekend at her friend Natalie's house in the Hamptons, she boards the bus with an air of unspoken expectation, especially when she spots the very wealthy and still available, if somewhat uptight, Charlie Twigall. But the weekend's promise of potential partnering spirals into a disastrous series of mishaps that include an unwanted nighttime visit from Natalie's husband, the near drowning of Natalie's daughter, a bad financial gamble, and the expulsion of one Florence Collins from the premises. Thus begins this tragicomic novel about the sad plight of a woman on the make in Manhattan. Biding her time in a low-paying job at one of the lesser auction houses, Florence spends every cent of her not-so-hard-earned money and what's left of her mother's inheritance on body wraps, designer clothes, custom-mixed makeup and skin emollients, and every other known accessory--all in the vain hope of attracting a rich husband. In prose at once biting and sparkling, Janowitz has created a novel of modern manners with this sly and unforgettable portrait of New York society, as unforgiving today as it was a hundred years ago.

A Certain Age

DOUBLEDAY

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Books by Janowitz, Tama.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Janowitz, Tama.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

SCREAM

Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction

Peyton Amberg: A Novel

Peyton Amberg: A Novel

Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights

Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights

Slaves of New York (Picador Books)

A CANNIBAL IN MANHATTAN.

Cannibal In Manhattan (Picador Books)

A Certain Age