AMANDA FILIPACCHI

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

The internationally acclaimed debut of a novelist described by the New York Times Book Review as a “lovely comic surrealist”—a story of sex, love, and art found in the unlikeliest of places.

Jeremy Acidophilus is not really named after the yogurt culture—he just likes to tell people that he is. Actually, he thought of that line years ago but has never been brave enough to use it on someone—until he meets Lady Henrietta over a dish of green Jell-O in his new favorite coffee shop. A painter of naked men for Playgirl magazine who has taken her name from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Henrietta has the power to make Jeremy do all kinds of things he would not normally do, including disrobe for a stranger. He thinks that he must be falling in love. Think again, says Sara, the artist’s outrageously precocious eleven-year-old daughter as she sets out to seduce the new model.

From the gray streets of Manhattan to the pastel kaleidoscope of Disney World, Jeremy’s journey of self-discovery is both irresistibly absurd and uncannily real. Everyone—from his cat Minou to a dancing magician named Laura to the agents hired by his mother to taunt him—has advice for Jeremy. Before he can hear any of it, though, he first needs to find out how to listen to himself.

A witty and wild exploration of sexuality, creativity, and the paradoxes of self, Nude Men is the rare novel with the power to charm and shock in equal measure.
(Book description via Open Road Integrated Media.)

Excerpts of Nude Men have been anthologized in:

—The Best American Humor 1994 (published by Simon & Schuster 1994)
—Voices of the Xiled (published by Doubleday 1994)
—The Good Parts: The Best Erotic Writing In Modern Fiction (published by Berkley Books 2000)
—Women’s Wicked Wisdom: From Mary Shelley to Courtney Love (Chicago Review Press 2004)

PRAISE & REVIEWS

“A quirky, unpredictable comedy of contemporary urban morals…Reminiscent of some of Philip Roth’s zanier explorations of identity and sexuality.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Filipacchi is fearsomely witty…a truly clever first novel, one that makes you feel clever as you read it.”
—The Village Voice

“An exhilarating pleasure.”
—Newsday

“Witty and unpredictable to the end, Nude Men is a quirky tale of twisted morals.”
—Vogue

“Exuberantly inventive…Droll, mesmerizing and memorable…with a particular brand of sly naïveté all its own.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Even at its most twisted…Nude Men somehow has the charm of a fairy tale.”
—New York Magazine

“Deftly comic and ingenuous….intelligent, imaginative, and, with every page, increasingly surreal.”
– Library Journal

“Nude Men is everything you don’t expect it to be—hilarious, full of plot surprises, and completely original.”
—Louis Malle

“Filipacchi’s novel of manners…is a sly look at contemporary sexual politics and mores.”
—Vanity Fair

“An optical illusion novel: savor the shimmering wit and sharp writing from a distance; or get close and risk seeing something that may shock you.”
—Details Magazine

“Playful, perverse and wonderfully funny, it’s hard to say whether Amanda Filipacchi’s first novel is rescue from or a fatal case of the human condition. Either way, here is an irresistible introduction to a sublimely precocious writer.”
—Kathryn Harrison

“Nude Men is more than a little bit fantastic…Filipacchi’s [writing] is truly funny, [and] she has the self-mocking, well-chosen arrows of John Fante; I look forward to more writing with that directness.”
—Paper

“This is one of the most bizarre, challenging novels I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best…Nude Men is, by turns, shocking, funny, moving, perverse and very, very clever.”
—British New Woman

“How come Britain can’t produce young writers as fresh and inventive as Amanda Filipacchi?”
—The Face