Many men aim high; Tom Farrell dares to be average. While his friends accumulate wedding rings, mortgages, and even, alarmingly, babies, Tom still lives alone in his rented apartment with nothing but condiments and alcohol in his refrigerator. He spends Saturday mornings watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs out of an Empire Strikes Back bowl, and devotes the rest of the weekend to his other favorite hobbies: sports and girls. His credo, to think and act like a thirteen-year-old boy at all times, has worked well enough to land him a decent job writing headlines for the New York Tabloid. But neither his personal life nor his professional life has any forward momentum; he's occupied the same cubicle since the first George Bush was president and is currently "between girlfriends." At thirty-two, it starts to occur to him: There's a fine line between picky and loser. Enter a sly, beautiful coworker named Julia. After a few torrid dates, Tom is hooked. "She's like cleaning behind my refrigerator. A once-in-a-lifetime thing." But the closer he gets to Julia, the more elusive she becomes. Frustrated, Tom seeks the dubious advice of his buddy Shooter, a shallow sexual gladiator, and wonders why he keeps getting into arguments with Bran, his smart, sarcastic "default date." But then tragedy strikes, and everyone's attitudes toward life and love change -- and even Tom begins to see himself in a new light. By turns riotous and tenderhearted, Kyle Smith's Love Monkey is the most candid and excruciatingly funny exploration of the male mind and libido since High Fidelity. Tom Farrell--single, 32, smart, caustic, and often drunk--is a "rewrite" wiz at a "real tabloidy tabloid" in New York City and in desperate need of a mate. But so intent is he on acting the part of a witty, laidback, sensitive lover boy that none of the gorgeous, intelligent, and cutthroat women he woos takes him seriously, especially his obsession, the wretchedly manipulative Julia. Basically, this debut novel is a jejune tale of unrequited love sloppily tied to 9/11. But Smith, the book and music review editor at People , is so devilishly hilarious in his parsing of his narrator-hero's romantic longings and degraded vocation (his sly co-workers are a riot), and so electrifying in his assaults on New York pretension, the inanities of new parents, bad rock and roll, the horrors of dating, and the conflicting desires for casual sex and undying love, he manages to generate a wealth of intriguing psychological and social minutiae. Ultimately, this is an amusing and endearing portrait of a near-loser about to blossom into a truly cool guy. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Hilarious.” (New York Times) “Love Monkey nails it!” (Time Magazine) “An exceedingly readable and wickedly funny romantic comedy.” (San Francisco Chronicle) “Hilarious...refreshing.... A helluva lot of fun.” (Entertainment Weekly) “The male BRIDGET JONES: New York’s most buzzed-about novel.” (New York Post) “The American answer to HIGH FIDELITY.” (Glamour) “The American answer to Nick Hornby...a cheeky, ribald, riotous page-turner.” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) “[LOVE MONKEY] will no doubt be heralded as the male Bridget Jones.” (New York Times Book Review) “LOVE MONKEY ... resurrects and updates the Dorothy Parker style of talking about New York ....[Smith’s] ruthless humor knows no bounds.” (Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air) “Screamingly funny.” (Hartford Courant) “Cleverly, breathlessly written, with laughs on every page....A worthy debut.” (Miami Herald) “Move over Bridget Jones....Kyle Smith’s LOVE MONKEY is by turns hilarious and touching.” (Boston Herald) “Deeply hilarious and incriminatingly insightful....literary junk food for the Hungry-Man soul.” (Los Angeles Times) “Hilarious ....Very funny and unexpectedly touching ...had [me] laughing out loud for an hour.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) “I laughed....I must confess to being a sucker for Smith’s brand of cheeky humor.” (Baltimore Sun) “Full of sexy tomfoolery....[Yet] carefully concealed beneath the glittery fun is a novel of craft and purpose.” (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel) “Readers [will] soon realize that everything he thinks and almost everything he says is either perfectly perceptive or wryly amusing.” (Daily News) “Wickedly wry....Move over, Carrie Bradshaw.” (New York Sun) “Devilishly hilarious ... An amusing and endearing portrait of a near-loser about to blossom into a truly cool guy.” (Booklist) “Fast-paced and witty [with] laugh-out-loud moments … A novel that’s worth checking out.” (Romantic Times BOOKclub) “An instant classic .... gives women the one thing they almost never get from men—the truth.” (Marian Keyes) “Somewhere between Nick Hornby...and David Sedaris....A lively, promising debut.” (Publishers Weekly) “Funny ... entertaining ... dashed with a pleasing amount of malice.” (Kirkus Reviews) “Very funny and the writing is superb. K