Not Her Real Name - Softcover

Not Her Real Name is the stylish debut of a new and startlingly young international literary voice. A collection of twelve stories peopled by over-sensitive twenty-somethings, Not Her Real Name transcends the self-indulgence that generally plagues the slacker genre and brings modern life into harsh and comic focus.

With a cinematic vision for character and dialogue and a cast of young and painfully vulnerable metropolitans, Perkins speaks to twenty-somethings like no one else. With unnerving wit and insight, these stories deal with diverse subjects, from a chance meeting with an old lover in a supermarket to a couple's ill-fated trip to discover the real Prague, to a drama student pissed off by Clown class Not Her Real Name presents an essential guide to post-modern romance, to the vagaries of city life and to a chronically self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen.

... a debut collection of 12 moody short stories by Emily Perkins, a young New Zealander who now lives in London. Kicking off with the title selection, about a financially challenged waitress who ends up sharing her apartment with a man she had an adolescent crush on years before, Perkins goes on to present a variety of disgruntled protagonists amid a variety of settings. Among the more memorable yarns are "After McDonald's," a painfully funny account of two talent-free former employees of the Golden Arches on a quest for fame, and "A Place Where No One Knows Your Face," which perfectly captures the impatient stream-of-consciousness ramble of a child trapped in the back seat of the car on a family vacation. -- The New York Times Book Review, J. D. Biersdorfer