Before writing about Keith Gessen, how Sloan Crosley’s cooler than him, and why I’m a bona fide loser, let’s back track a bit. (Oh, and please make note: this not a review of their works, as a colleague at CollegeCandy has already been kind enough to write about Crosley’s work. Moreover, I have yet to read these two recently published books).

Once upon a time, in a beautiful castle high above NYC, Mr. Leon Neyfakh wrote a piece about Ms. Crosley in The New York Observer…

In part, the piece publicized her novel, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, but the primary focus of Mr. Neyfakh’s article praised Ms. Crosley’s aura of exuberant “niceness.” Not surprisingly, such a personality trait is all but absent, if not extinct, among the effete New York literary crowd. But is that really true? If one were to believe Neyfakh’s claims, embrace Ms. Crosley’s genuine goodness in contradistinction to the scene of blobby, degenerate, self-absorbed New York literati, the picture - in my mind - is plain boring and problematically monolithic.

For all intents and purposes, these literati types are just exhausted, absolutely exhausted from their own ennui, the same old schmoozing fests that they must endure; exquisitely over-expensive cocktails either in swanky bars in Manhattan or at some boring, obligatory party in the “country.” It’s the same ol’ picture we Kansans (and everybody else outside of/excluded from the cherished and sought after New York City publishing scene) are hand fed. Read More »

When I read Sloane Crosley’s bio and saw that she listed, “…the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim in that magazine’s history” among her accomplishments, I knew her literary voice was the type that I would enjoy.

Crosley was a writer living in Manhattan, publishing stories in magazines from Playboy to The New York Times until she decided to start writing essays after getting locked out of two separate apartments, in one day.

The collection of essays make for a great read because they’re almost like “speed dating” (to quote Ms. Crosley herself). Her voice, as well as her stories, are witty, honest, irreverent and entertaining.

Take this for example: in one of her essays Sloane reveals a collection of plastic ponies she had accumulated from boyfriends over the years which she kept “semi-secretly” in a kitchen drawer, imagining what it would be like if she died one day and people found them in her apartment…

Pick up the book, I’m telling you — you’ll totally enjoy it.

OR, Participate in her Pony Project on Flickr.

Have your own drawer full of plastic ponies or other “nostalgic” mementos of love gone awry / other hilarious disappointments and minor humiliations? Share your traumatic trinkets with us.