num_pages: 273
description: PROBLEM:You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You cant say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you cant say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations youve received from around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?ANSWER: You accept them all. If you are Arthur Less.Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico Italy Germany Morocco India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris almost fall to his death in Berlin barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans crazed academics emergency rooms starlets doctors exes and on a desert island in the Arabian Sea the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life as he thinks of it falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.A love story a satire of the American abroad a rumination on time and the human heart by an author The New York Times has hailed as inspired lyrical elegiac ingenious as well as too sappy by half Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
language: English
title: Less
publisher: Lee Boudreaux Books