Fran Lebowitz is a very funny woman.

This book combines Fran Lebowitz's earlier books: Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. It is a humorous and sardonic look at life. The books are a series of short essays or notes on observation. Some made me laugh and some were just ho-hum.
I think I prefer listening to Fran Lebowitz talk and give her observations, rather than reading them. I just enjoy her voice and her wit, and it comes across better, to me, in her speech. ( )

She's much funnier in person, but there are some good laughs and sage social observations in here. ( )

Only about halfway through and already I feel like this will be a DNF for me, or at least something I won't view too favorably in hindsight. This was sold to me as an essay collection, but these pieces seem much more like extended jokes than essays. And, of course, as everyone else has noted, the collection feels aggressively dated. Part of why I say "extended jokes" is because many of them rely on some sort of cultural set-up that someone, in the time, would likely have absorbed automatically just by living in New York, but that has been completely lost to history. Unfortunately, there is never enough context provided to remedy this defect, nor is the prose itself engaging or witty enough to regularly stand on its own.

The long and the short is that unless you are from Ms. Lebowitz's era, or have extensive knowledge of the cultural mores of the era, I'd not recommend this particular reader. ( )

Es una provocadora nata, capaz de bajarles los humos a la mayoría de sus conciudadanos y de reírse de cualquier situación: la búsqueda de apartamento, las facturas de teléfono impagadas, un viaje, las firmas de libros, el dormir (o no dormir) a horas indecentes, las ansias de triunfar, tomar unas copas con celebridades, los buenos restaurantes o la (adulta) educación de los hijos. Por si todavía no lo han adivinado, hablamos de Fran Lebowitz. Hablamos de Nueva York. Célebre al hilo de la serie Pretend It’s a City, de Martin Scorsese, Fran Lebowitz ha sido una gran desconocida que, por fin, y con toda justicia, ha obtenido el éxito que merecía. Su prosa, ahora reunida, es un compendio del humor más refrescante y mordaz que se haya leído en décadas.