AMANDA FILIPACCHI

E-book edition, Open Road Integrated Media (2014)

A New York love story as seductively neurotic as the city itself.

At thirty-two years old, Lynn Gallagher is one of the five most influential contemporary-art gallery owners in Manhattan. Too bad her face is dead. Not so, says Lynn’s assistant, but that is how it feels when she compares it to her stalker’s face. Alan Morton may be a plump, goofy-looking accountant, but his face glows with life when he peers at Lynn through her gallery window. The difference is that Alan wants something—her—very badly, while Lynn wants nothing at all.

So she decides to stalk.

The object of her obsession—French attorney Roland Dupont—is chosen at random in a Chelsea bakery. He is attractive, but it is not until he expresses his disinterest in her that Lynn begins to truly desire him. Alan, jealous of Lynn’s newfound hobby, befriends Roland to find out what she sees in him. When Roland learns that he acquired his stalker by happenstance, he decides that he might be interested in Lynn after all. Soon all three are brazenly pursuing each other across the city—from adult education classes in the art of beading to meetings of Stalker’s Anonymous—as they try to figure out what it is that they truly want. The advice of Ray, the homeless psychologist who observes their madcap comings and goings, is not much help at all: “Take a break, an antidepressant. Get hold of yourselves.”

A hip and darkly humorous novel about the mysteries of romance, Love Creeps is pure Amanda Filipacchi—funny, wicked, and wise.

(Book description via Open Road Integrated Media.)
 

AWARDS:

U.S.:

“Top 25 Books of the Year,” The Village Voice
 link

Best Book of Prose: Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi (St. Martin’s Press): 2006 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award (Southern Illinois University)

France:

Best Foreign Novel: Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi (Editions Denoël): Lauriers Verts de La Forêt des Livres (2006)

 
PRAISE & REVIEWS

“Inventive… hilarious… [Amanda Filipacchi’s] style is reminiscent in certain ways of Muriel Spark. Love Creeps is a rare treat. It’s intelligent and perceptive about the slippery nature of desire. And it’s extraordinarily funny.”
—The Boston Globe

“A surreal comedy of manners that’s also a surprisingly penetrating work of psychological fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[Filipacchi’s] writing is both humorous and sharp, but it’s also incredibly insightful: in telling the story of these three strange people, she makes piercing observations about human nature and seemingly inexplicable behavior. Brilliant.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“A fast-moving surrealistic sex farce about fear, seduction and stalking in Manhattan—a place where everybody is spying on everybody else—that’s part suspense comedy and part philosophical treatise on the neurosis of love. This is, by far, Amanda Filipacchi’s funniest and most accomplished novel.”
—Bret Easton Ellis

“Whimsical and subversive, Love Creeps takes the hot, tragic issues of our day (stalking, child abuse) and cools them down to wry comedy. The result is both shocking and philosophical.”
—Edmund White

“Filipacchi has such an original voice and this book is her most hilarious and thought-provoking yet—entertainingly complex!”
—Tama Janowitz

“One of the year’s twenty-five best books. With a flair for delightfully silly dialogue, Filipacchi’s third novel portrays romance as the tricky, prickly game that it is.”
—The Village Voice

“It’s a love story of stalkers in New York. It’s great. It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read.”
—Brian Dannelly, director/co-writer of “Saved!”