The Reluctant Metrosexual:
Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life
By Peter Hyman (Villard, August 2004)

Written during the early part of the millennium, Peter Hyman's first book, The Reluctant Metrosexual: Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life is, like the works of Hemingway and Melville, printed on paper (except for the parts available digitally and via audio CD).   A collection of humor essays, the book is also (purportedly) an examination of what it means to be a man in this day and age.   Mostly, however, it is noteworthy for its excellent use of commas, and the elegant readability of the font (Walbaum, named for the German who invented the typeface). The author is proud of the work, and several lovely critics were kind enough to compare his writing style to David Sedaris and P.J. O'Rourke, among other notable authors. (Listen to an audio excerpt! )

Bar Mitzvah Disco:
The Music May Have Stopped But the Party's Never Over
By Roger Bennett, Nick Kroll, Jules Shell   (Crown, November 2005)

For this hilarious examination of Bar Mitzvah culture of the 1970s and 1980s, I contributed a humor essay entitled “Confessions of a Waspy Jew:   The Bar Mitzvah Years.”   The book features a delicious trove of photographic footage of this ancient rite of passage, alongside essays on this most embarrassing of Semitic experiences.

Class Dismissed:
75 Amazing, Mind-Expanding College Exploits  (Villard, July 2006)

I contributed a humor essay for this anthology of college stories, published by Random House.   My essay recalls a date gone awry with an intelligent comparative lit major who, at the end of our evening, proclaimed that I “wasn't going to talk her into bed.”   Was this my intention?   Did this experience define my entire collegiate existence?   And how sorry was the state of culture in the late 1980s the college men had to rely on the saccharine sounds of George Michael to woo women?   Read the book and find out.