Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale

Chris Ayres

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Yes!

For Chris Ayres, the young British journalist whose first book, War Reporting for Cowards, was celebrated as gripping (People), blushingly honest (Los Angeles Times), and hysterically funny (CNN), life in Hollywood is no celebrity junket--it's a full-immersion gonzo experiment. After returning to Los Angeles from his harrowing experience in Iraq, Ayres decides to trade the front lines of war for the front lines of the extreme leisure economy. Like Hunter Thompson crossed with one of David Brooks's bobos in paradise, Ayres embeds himself in L.A.'s leisuretocracy: an over-the-top-everything world of caviar facials, billionaire charity balls, souped-up SUVs, and monster home loans . . . not to mention thousand-dollar-a-night brothels and million-dollar poker tournaments. Ayres's highly leveraged lifestyle lands him a surreal night with a supermodel and a disastrous date at Michael Jackson's birthday party at Neverland Ranch (Ayres bribes the organizers five grand to get in). Dreading his thirtieth birthday and determined to find meaning--and maybe a girlfriend--through gratuitous consumption, Ayres begins to auction his possessions via Craigslist as part of a pledge to upgrade everything. Bizarrely, he discovers this is the perfect way to meet girls: A succession of beautiful-but-broke starlets parade through his living room to buy his old furniture. Naturally, he marries one of them. But disaster is never far away. Whether it's a wildfire the size of Massachusetts in which Ayres becomes trapped or a flood that almost wipes his home off its mountainside, the leisure economy seems to be balanced on a precipice. In the book's brutal final section, Ayres is forced to confront theexcesses of his generation at a scene of apocalyptic destruction: the Katrina-ravaged South. Told with the same blend of offbeat irreverence, genuine pathos, and incisive social commentary as War Reporting for Cowards, Ayres's Death by Leisure is a savage and darkly humorous odyssey that taps directly into the contemporary psyche.

Book Details

Publisher: Grove Press
Publish Date: Feb 2nd, 2010
Pages: 300
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 1.00in - 0.60lb
EAN: 9780802143655
Categories: • Popular Culture• Form - Essays• General

Praise for this book

"War is hell. But through the eyes of Chris Ayres, It's also funny as hell."

"Among the best of the growing number of accounts of the Iraq War." -- John Brady

"Ayres's book is heartbreakingly funny and often tender and always insightful." -- Anthony Swofford

"Hilarious . . . Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld being sent off to cover the Iraq War. . . . Reads as though Larry David had rewritten MASH and Evelyn Waugh's Scoop as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the pecullar experience of being an embedded reporter." -- Michiko Kakutani

"War Reporting for Cowards reminded me of the granddaddy of the genre, Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, and that Ayres's book can be mentioned in the same sentence is a tribute. . . . ChronicleÝs¨ many of the absurdities, horrors, and discomforts of life during wartime circa two years ago, and the honor and steadfastness of the men and women who have to endure them." -- Gary Shteyngart

"With dry British wit, [Ayres] skewers American greed, L.A. life, and his own endless romantic foibles. . . . Somehow, Ayres knew the fall was coming and kept going anyway. So did we." --"Time"

"Ayres was born to write this book . . . [He is] the perfect chronicler of this imperfect age." --"Los Angeles Times"

"Fast and funny . . . Global climate change and the collapse of the American home market should not be conflated as easily as they are here, in a gonzo-style book with topics skittering from $1-per-blackhead California facials to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Ayres somehow manages to cram all these elements into his wild-eyed American adventure." --"The New York Times"

"Hilarious . . . What makes it more than merely clever is the way Ayres turns his own romantic insecurity and material aspiration into a stinging, if sympathetic, indictment of mindless consumption. Yes, we're destroying the planet, he seems to say, but can we help it, given how pathetic we are? And anyone who can make us laugh at "that" must be a genius." --"Booklist" (starred review)

"A topsy-turvy carnival ride of a book . . . Ayres knows how to find the laughs and fantasy in this accomplished satire." --"Publishers Weekly"