Ames to Please

Among the themes that budding writers favor, self-destruction perennially hovers near the top of the list, and this last decade alone has produced a plethora of first novels featuring young urbanites flogging themselves with drugs and drink. Enter / Pass Like Night (William Morrow), a fiction debut from Jonathan Ames that makes Bret's and Jay's allnighters seem about as dangerous as a frat party. The story of a young New Yorker's relentless pursuit of unsafe sex—he frequents female prostitutes, falls into bed with anonymous condomless men—this is an unabashedly shocking book, made more shocking by the fact that its author is a twenty-five-yearold Princeton graduate with model looks (a selling point stressed by the book's publicists). Ames, though, isn't too bothered by what the neighbors will think. "There are a few relatives I'm concerned about," he admits, "but I'm hoping they won't read it." —J.R.

-J. R.