About The Book

Of Dan Rhodes’s award-winning Timoleon Vieta Come Home, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times said, “Mr. Rhodes [writes] with an anomalous blend of humor, heartfelt emotion and old-fashioned storytelling verve. He has written a beguiling and resonant little novel.” And when he took on the nom de plume Danuta De Rhodes to pen his chick-lit send-up The Little White Car, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post said, “Younger readers and chick-lit aficionados doubtless will be its most appreciative readers, but this old crock enjoyed it, too.”

Called “an ingenious project in prose construction” (Publishers Weekly), Anthropology enhanced Rhodes’s reputation. He was declared one of Granta‘s Best Young British Novelists in 2003. Rhodes’s gift for understated wallops and his profound humor address sex, love, dating, and the confoundingly beautiful, inscrutable girlfriend.

Praise

“Clever concept, well executed . . . witty, often wicked and above all, fun. Read them to your squeeze.” —People

“One hundred and one stories, all about girlfriends. They cheat, they die, they leave, frequently. . . . The funny stories are all the funnier for being brief; the sad ones all the sadder for being sparse. Every one a twenty-second gem.” —Maxim

Praise for Dan Rhodes:

“Dan Rhodes is the master of a new art form. In the blink of an eye he tells you everything. He’s a brilliant writer who puts lightning in the spaces between words and, in one paragraph, creates a world.” —Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat

“You hungrily absorb this book the way you do Nietzsche’s aphorisms: You look for truths; you look for yourself; you look for explanations. Of course this is more fun than Nietzsche because there are more laughs. Rhodes boils down the stories of love between men and women to their comic, sad, and mad essentials: why we want each other and why we repel each other.” —Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man and What’s Not to Love?

Excerpt

Bulletin

My girlfriend is so lovely that I can’t help feeling sorry for all her ex-boyfriends. I’m sure they must spend all their time thinking about her and wondering what she could be up to. So every month I send them a bulletin detailing all the pretty things she has said and done. Sometimes I enclose a discarded pair of tights, or the stub of an eyebrow pencil. I feel I should do everything I can to make up for them having lost a girl with such soft brown hair, and whose feet are so small you can hardly see them.

Me

Emerald tried to go on holiday, but her bag was so big they wouldn’t let her on the plane. She came home and I looked at what she had packed. I found the things I’d have expected: sun lotion, swimming costume, phrasebook. But most of her load was made up of pictures of me. She had packed framed portraits, several photo albums and a cushion on which she had embroidered my face. “It would have been a whole week,” she sobbed. “I had to.” I told her she didn’t need to say another word, and kissed those soft lips until daybreak.