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*The cult TV series now becomes a major film

About the Author

A seasoned freelance writer, Candace Bushnell has been writing the 'Sex and the City' column since 1994. She is also a regular contributor to VOGUE. Ms Bushnell lives in New York City.

Reviews

'Intriguing and highly entertaining' Helen Fielding, author of BRIDGET JONES' DIARY 'Imagine Jane Austen with a martini, or perhaps Jonathan Swift on rollerblades' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Imagine THE SUN edited by Jane Austen ... hilarious ... a compulsively readable book, served on bite-sized chunks of irrepressible irreverence.' MARIE CLAIRE 'Irresistable, hilarious and horrific, stylishly written. You might be appalled but anyone who lives here will recognise that Candace Bushnell has captured the big black truth. The only people who won't succumb to the book's very real charms are the ones in it and they'll probably be too preoccupied trying to figure out who's who.' Bret Easton Ellis 'Punchy, archly knowing and sharply observed...Bushnell offers a brash, radically unromantic perspective...the effect is that of an Armistead Maupin-like canvas tinged with a liberal smattering of Judith Krantz...these essay are brain candy that will appeal equally to urban romantics and unromantics.' PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY 'Fascinating and haunting insights into the love lives of the rich and randy in New York...An oddly touching collection...with the detached grace of an early Didion...Often funny and occasionally bleak, this is a captivating look at the 'Age of Un-Innocence' in a city in which the glittering diversions don't quite make up for the fact that 'Cupid has flown the coop." KIRKUS REVIEWS 'Bushnell's canape-sized bites of Manhattan life stylishly capture a clubbing and dating scene...' INDEPENDENT

"We're leading sensory saturated lives," announces jetsetting photographer and playboy Peter Beard in a roundtable discussion of ménages à trois, setting the tone of opulent debasement that suffuses this collection of Bushnell's punchy, archly knowing and sharply observed sex columns from the New York Observer. Prowling the modish clubs, party circuit and weekend getaways of rich and trendy New York society (most of whose denizens are identified by pseudonyms), Bushnell offers a brash, radically unromantic perspective. She visits a sex club and dates a Bicycle Boy ("the literary romantic subspecies" whose patron saints are George Plimpton and Murray Kempton). But in most chapters she keeps to the sidelines, deploying instead her alter-ego Carrie (like the author, a blonde writer from Connecticut in her mid-30s), whose sweet if feckless romance with Mr. Big‘a nondescript power player‘serves as a foil for the hilarious, unsentimentalized misadventures of her peers. These include model-chasers like Barkley, 25, a painter with the face of a Botticelli angel whose parents pay for his SoHo junior loft, and Tom Peri, the "emotional Mayflower," who ferries newly dumped women to higher emotional ground and is then invariably dumped. The effect is that of an Armistead Maupin-like canvas tinged with a liberal smattering of Judith Krantz. Collected in one volume, Bushnell's characters grow generic, but in small doses these essays are brain candy that will appeal equally to urban romantics and anti-romantics. (Aug.)