How Did You Get This Number

“How sure footed and observant Sloane Crosley is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny. If you needed a bib while reading I Was Told There’d Be Cake, you might consider diapers for How Did You Get This Number.”
—David Sedaris

“Essayist Sloane Crosley doesn’t just tell us her life story through anecdotes, she makes us feel as if we’re part of them…tell[ing] fascinating little stories in wonderful and entertaining ways…Crosley takes life’s awkward confrontations, fondest memories from childhood and the unexpected, ironic incidents that happen each day, and turns them into wry, witty and sometimes touchingly sentimental observations.  Her gift is making even the most insignificant details illuminating and delightful.”
—USA Today

“[A] winning new collection…Hilarious…In what feels like the book’s centerpiece, ‘Light Pollution,’ Crosley visits Alaska for a friend’s wedding; her sightseeing is interrupted by an unsettlingly literal collision between man and nature. The ensuing piece is stunning, built on the delicate balance of strange and ordinary that infuses the author’s work at its best…Crosley responds to everyday absurdities with self-deprecation and an arsenal of metaphors, applying insights like a salve… As she expounds on her various mishaps and anxieties, it all manages to seem like proof that even when she’s lost, she knows what she’s doing all along.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Crosley writes with such buoyancy… In How Did You Get This Number self-deprecating humor is her weapon of choice, but Crosley’s final essay, ‘Off the Back of a Truck,’ in which she interconnects a painful breakup with the purchase of stolen furniture, shows a depth that’s every bit as enjoyable as the full-on belly laughs.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Charming…Crosley has an original spark…[and is] capable of surprising you with… reserves of emotion and keen social observation…She tends to be right about the things that matter. In her best essay, ‘Off the Back of a Truck,’ she artfully blends a story of falling in love with another about furnishing her apartment with the help of a high-end furniture thief.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Undeniably funny…Crosley’s work speaks volumes to her generation…[She has] proven herself to be an exciting new talent.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Laugh-out-loud essays drip with sarcasm and silliness abound in How Did You Get This Number…[It] moved me to laughter that had my [airplane] seatmates wondering what exactly I was being served. The answer? The witty, smart, skilled workings of a wordsmith that thrust the reader into laugh-out-loud territory…Crosley captivates the reader from the very first sentence…[She is] worthy of your attention and bound to be a fixture on bookshelves for years to come.”
—San Francisco Examiner

“Nine thoughtful, unfussy essays by the author of the collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake navigate around illusions of youth in the hope that by young adulthood they’ll all add up to happiness… Crosley delivers witty, syncopated takes on visiting Alaska and Paris, and finding much consolation from a two-timing heartbreak in New York by buying stolen items from her upholstery guy, Daryl, who found them fallen “Off the Back of a Truck,” as the delightful last selection is titled. These essays are fresh, funny, and eager to be loved.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A worthy successor to Crosley’s well-received debut, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008). Where her first collection focused on a young professional’s life in Manhattan, this follow-up finds the author—whose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentioned—taking her show on the road. She gets lost in Lisbon (actually, she gets lost pretty much everywhere), threatened by a bear in Alaska and all but deported from France—or at least discouraged from ever again visiting Notre Dame. Most of the book is funny, some of it even laugh-out-loud, but her literary gifts go well beyond easy laughs…. Confirmation of the promise shown in the author’s bestselling debut.”
—Kirkus (starred)

I Was Told There’d Be Cake

“Quirky twentysomething essayist Crosley has a gimlet eye for everyday absurdities—especially those she encounters as she maneuvers the wilds of Manhattan. In this stellar debut, she riffs on everything from the meaning of her cache of plastic ponies to being maid of honor for a woman she hasn’t seen since high school. Crosley’s style is so conversationally intimate that you’ll feel as though you’re sitting with her at a café, breathlessly waiting to hear what she’s going to tell you next.”
—People

“Sloane Crosley is another mordant and mercurial wit from the realm of Sedaris and Vowell. What makes her so funny is that she seems to be telling the truth, helplessly.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“Whether she’s locking herself out of her apartment twice in one day, baking a cookie in the shape of her boss’ face to win her approval, or trying to determine which of her friends defecated on her bathroom floor, Sloane Crosley asserts herself as a new master of nonfiction situational comedy in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, her debut collection of hilariously uncomfortable personal essays.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Charming, elegant, wise, and comedic, these essays absolutely sparkle and entertain. Sloane Crosley is a twenty-first-century Dorothy Parker, and this book is a gem and heralds a wry new voice in American letters. Gorgeous writing, outrageous humor—it’s all here!”
—Jonathan Ames

“The essays in this exquisite collection, Crosley’s first, spin around a young woman’s growing up and her first experiences in a big city, New York, as it happens. The voice feels a little like Nora Ephron’s, a little like Dorothy Parker’s and David Sedaris’, although Crosley has a spry wistfulness that’s very much her own. We envy the lucky guy who found the right words to ask her for a date while she was hanging from a strap in the subway, and applaud the arrival of a very funny writer.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Whether you’re involved in a love/hate relationship with just yourself or with the entire world, these essays will charm the pants off you—but not so as you’ll feel violated. Sloane Crosley is bright and funny and enchanting. This is a sparkling debut.”
—Meghan Daum

“Sloane Crosley channels David Sedaris—and Carrie Bradshaw—in a slightly cracked and often charming collection of essays recounting a suburban girl’s adventures in the big city.”
—Vogue

“Hilarious and affecting and only occasionally scatological, I Was Told There’d Be Cake is lively reminiscence about growing up strange. Sardonic without being cruel, tender without being sentimental, Sloane Crosley will win you over with this delightful debut.”
—Colson Whitehead

“Crosley’s book [is] a welcome departure from the increasingly tired genre of first-person prose as stand-up comedy. Unlike David Sedaris (I went to Anne Frank’s house and all I got was real-estate lust!) and other hugely successful practitioners, Crosley forces herself up against not her exquisite selfishness but some ideal she’s grasping for—female camaraderie, neighborliness, sanity. She’s also got a sharp, fizzily old-fashioned sense of the madcap that, in the best pieces, has you thinking that she’s figured how to cross Mary Tyler Moore with Kingsley Amis—as well as wondering, now that she’s updated the role of ingenue by concocting a bracing cocktail of credulity and crankiness, what she might be able to do with a novel.”
—Elle

“I Was Told There’d Be Cake begins with a hilarious first sentence, and gets funnier from there.”
—Andy Borowitz

“Hyped like she’s the next David Sedaris, Crosley is sure to inspire envy of epic proportions. The horrible catch: Her book is truly well-crafted and genuinely funny.”
—Details

“I love Sloane Crosley. In I Was Told There’d Be Cake, she navigates the social, the moral, the romantic experiences that prompt her to create her own voice and freshly define the world around her. Crosley is a postmodern Mary Tyler Moore, and this book is wry, generous, knowing—a perfect document of what it is to be young in today’s world.”
—A. M. Homes

“A vibrant voice… piquant prose… Her writerly persona is a blend of candor, wit and self-deprecation… Smart, sardonic.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There’s a giddy coherence to the collection. This is accomplished in part by Crosley’s voice, a weird, alluring intersection of Dorothy Parker-esque, Fran Lebowitz-ish archness and loopy, almost slaphappy sensibility… its zany episodes and poignant interludes transcend the author’s particular experience to gesture at something more universal… many readers will hopelessly, helplessly, see themselves.”
—Time Out New York

“You’ll be in lurve with Sloane Crosley after you read her hilarious new memoir, I Was Told There’d Be Cake… Although the stories are set in New York, Crosley’s plights are universally relatable and described in a voice that’s supremely witty and genuine.”
—Daily Candy

“Crosley’s essays expertly juggle the hilarious and a mournful sense of the passage of time….a triumph of both the universal and the specific.”
—Bookforum

“Riveting… Masterful… She’s ironic, droll and self-pillorying and, like Sedaris, she manages to balance passages that are laugh-out-loud funny with others that are both touching and resonant. Above all Crosley manages, Midas-like, to take the minutiae of her life — and all of our lives — and turn it into gold.”
—Seattle Times

“I Was Told There’d Be Cake is a collection of rip-roaring essays following Crosley’s misadventures in the Big City…. Sloane’s is a generous, sparkling hilarity, and if the show is in Technicolor, the laughs are never cheap. By the end of the book, the flirtation has worked, and you’re left desperate for more.”
—New York Newsday

“A delightful debut collection… Crosley takes her own bittersweet time in these 15 essays, carefully building momentum with telling details, deft asides, plus well-orchestrated absurdities. The new author comes across less as stand-up comic and more as an everyperson who uses her off-kilter humor to muddle through the inevitable belly flops of fledgling adulthood…. Utterly hilarious… Engaging…. Irrepressible.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“This hilarious book of 15 essays explores the challenges of being a 20-something woman. The author covers everything from hiding her childhood toys under the sink to being a bridesmaid for a less-than-good friend. Witty and honest, the book will feel like brunch with your girlfriends, but funnier.”
—Shape

“This debut essay collection is full of sardonic wit and charm, and Crosley effortlessly transforms what could have been stereotypical tales of mid-20s life into a breezy series of vignettes with uproariously unpredictable outcomes….Fans of Sarah Vowell’s razor-sharp tongue will love this original new voice.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)