Amy Sohn lives in New York, where she writes a raunchy column for the New York Press called "Female Trouble." Her first novel features a young woman named Ariel Steiner, who lives in New York and writes a raunchy column called "Run Catch Kiss" for City Week. Any other similarities between author and creation are, no doubt, purely accidental. We first meet Ariel the summer after her graduation from college when she returns to the city, ready to resume the acting career she had as a child. Unfortunately, college not only enlarged Ariel's mind--it had a broadening effect on her body as well. "I can't send you out for any ingenue parts until you lose fifteen pounds," her agent tells her. Ariel is sure this won't take long and indulges in an optimistic fantasy about the fame and fortune that will soon come her way once she's lost the weight--an appearance in a George C. Wolfe production; a walk-on in a George Clooney film; an Oscar-winning performance in a Woody Allen movie, complete with requisite Oscar fantasy: "I'd bring my father as my date, and when Jack Palance opened the envelope and announced me as the winner, I'd run up to the stage in a strapless Chanel and they'd cut to a shot of my dad drowning in a sea of his own mucus." But until the day when Ariel Steiner becomes the third part of a Hollywood girl-triumvirate comprised of herself, Gwyneth, and Winona, a girl's got to eat; and so begins a ribaldly picaresque journey from actress wannabe to infamous New York sex columnist--"the Hester Prynne of downtown."

Run Catch Kiss is a novel that will appeal to a very specific audience--fans of Amy Sohn; young college graduates who'd like to imagine it's really this easy to achieve notoriety in a city like New York; and readers who enjoy lots of name-dropping, club-hopping, and frank descriptions of sex and other bodily functions. Sohn includes several of Ariel's columns ("Stench of a Woman," for example, or "Smutlife") as well as the letters she gets in response. In between, Ariel and her cronies and assorted one-night stands hang out in places with names like BarF and BarBarella, and drop pop references to Gen-X movies and music. Sohn delivers it all up with moxie, making up for the novel's literary weaknesses by sheer full-frontal outrageousness. --Alix Wilber

"I was only twenty-two and already I was infamous..." So begins Amy Sohn's hilarious and wise debut novel, Run Catch Kiss.

When the saucy Ariel Steiner returns home to New York City to be an actress, she is buoyed by daydreams of becoming Hollywood's hottest ingenue. Nothing can stand in her way -- nothing, that is, but her freshman-fifteen pounds, a senile talent agent, and the fact that she's living back home with her parents in Brooklyn.

While waiting for the ever-elusive big break, Ariel discovers a hidden talent for channeling her erotic fantasies and becomes a sex columnist at New York's hottest downtown weekly. Soon, art and life are imitating one another, and the junkies, commitmentphobes, and other subjects of Ariel's columns are wreaking havoc on her life. But when she finally falls in love, the real Ariel must stand up. Is she a nice Jewish girl who wants to settle down or a brazen sex kitten who'd rather meet a deadline than the man of her dreams?

Sharp, savvy, and irresistible, Run Catch Kiss is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on that dangerous turn-of-the-century phenomenon: the single girl who wants it all.

Amy Sohn is one funny chick. Her obsession with getting laid and giving head and her tendency to lapse into reptitive sexual fantasies notwithstanding, there's lots to love here. Her depictions of the off Broadway and off off Broadway worlds are uncanny. I had to keep reminding myself she's 22. She's 22. Everybody's a romantic nutcase when they're 22.

I just finished this book and I must say IT IS NOT " The thinking person's Bridget Jones" - The Independent. Whoever wrote that review should be fired ~
This main character in this book (Ariel) has very very very very low self esteem and acts really cheap. I didn't think that she was an interesting character. I kept thinking that the book would get better but it didn't, it was also too long because the character doesn't change or grow. The sex scenes described in this book were a little gross. Overall I didn't like it and I cannot recommend it. The only good thing I can say about it is that it has fast-paced writing.

I liked the writing and the story line is decent enough but some of the sex episodes are incredible--few folks get there so quickly and attach so little meaning to it all, with people they hardly know. Or maybe few decent folks do. It's not the action--that's good and funky, lively and thrilling--but the related choices that just don't cut it for me.

This has to be the worst thing I have ever read. The characters self esteme must be in the gutter because of all the guys she wants to hook up with, plus she masturbates while someone is talking to her.
Whoever lives a life like this in reality I don't envy them. I am not easily shocked, but some of the stuff coming from the pages of the book were just horrendous. I paid $1.99 at an A&P for this, it would have less painful just to throw it down the drain.

This book, although very sexually graphic at times, is quite a thrill to read and will be probably be embraced for anybody looking for a fix till the next 'Bridget Jones' Diary' book.

But 'Run Catch Kiss' has it's own rewards, in the form of a deliciously sexy narrative of Ariel Steiner, a twentysomething wannabe actress who's being cast in 'the fat girl' roles. She takes her sex escapades to the streets, cranking out a scandalous column (Her father remarks, "Your mother is thinking of getting shirts that say 'It isn't true")
in NYC's hottest weekly newspaper.

But the results aren't what she bargained for. Clever, witty and downright funny, Run Catch Kiss is a fitting title to join and...overtake the troupe of 'chick lit' books that seem to crowd the shelves these days.