Tama Janowitz's collection of short essays—some of them only a page or two long—spans two decades and a number of topics. But in one way or another the novelist, whose bestselling first book was called Slaves of New York, is writing about the city.

But whose New York is it? In "White, Single and Female in New York City” she conjures an angry, heartsick Dorothy Parker. When she goes for straight humor she's more Fran Lebowitz: gleefully glum. "Commencement Speech at the Community College of Beaver County" is a self-deprecating riot, full of things no one should say to kids about to embark on their future yet strangely uplifting.

Regardless of those similarities, whatever it is you love or hate about Janowitz—it's hard to imagine an in-between—won't be for the same reason you love or hate any other writer. After all, these are personal narratives, and when she describes her surroundings she's really talking about how she fits into them. Or doesn't. In "Style," she describes her lifelong love affair with clothing that the rest of the world seems to despise, and she hits on a poignant bit of truth about what it means to not conform: "Humiliating, and yet somehow a secret joy: to be able to upset people simply by wearing the wrong clothes!"

She also recalls her early years in the city, when she lived meagerly off an arts grant and ran in the same circles as then-underground artists Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring. Here too she's a strong-minded contrarian, unimpressed by art she saw as "crude, vulgar, stupid, violent—men, the work of men, 99 percent of the time, scrawlings on canvas, rough drawings, childlike, testosterone-laden—as if it had bubbled up from the creaky, cracking bubble-gum laden sidewalks of the New York City streets themselves."

It's a surprising opinion, in part because it's so unpopular and in part because at times her work seems rough or scrawled itself. The fact that she writes like she's having a conversation makes it all the more jarring when she ends a piece abruptly, as though she just got up and walked out of the room. But the beauty of the collection as a whole is that Janowitz isn't always rough, and she doesn't give a fig about being popular. When she writes about being ignored or outright trounced by other women in the literary establishment, she says (shouts, actually) that there's one thing no one can take from her: "I CANNOT BE STOPPED FROM WRITING." The way she celebrates her outsiderness—in a sort of depressive way, like a teenager—makes her as funny and empowered as a pouty punk princess with a busted tiara and a bad attitude.

If by now you're picturing a grouchy little kid stomping in mud puddles, that's not quite it—there's a real lust for life in these pages. Janowitz writes with a perverse zest about the animals in her life: "as far as I'm concerned a real dog should be timid, feeble, neurotic, snappish, picky, babyish or a combination of all of the above--like me, I guess." She also brightens when discussing food, to which a whole section of the book is devoted. In "Gluttony," she fantasizes not only about eating but about society being different so she could be different. "Basically the modern New York woman is expected to have the same shape as that of a really tough villager who lives in a primitive place and spends the day hunting and gathering, grinding corn, lugging heavy pots of water and her head, giving birth to babies in the field, never getting quite enough to eat. ... In my fantasy I have blond hair piled on top of my head, my face is jolly, my cheeks rosy pink. I am huge, I occupy the whole bed, mounds of luscious creamy flesh."

Dreaming about being happily at odds with everyone around her: it seems somehow perfect. And like she's already gotten her wish.

copyright Katie Haegele 2005