Call Me When You're Dead: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

Call Me When You're Dead is a darkly comic novel about payback gone wild, gone sour, maybe even sweet. If anything bad happens to me, I want you to get him. That's what Eleanor Birchs glamorous friend Sasha Cole requests of her during a New York City dinner one hot August night. Something bad does happen, and Eleanor is forced to become another person altogether in the wilds of Manhattan, acting as her own little Pygmalion in the harsh world of advertising and its remorseless denizens. How she triumphs, and how her prey becomes first her ally and then her lover, makes her journey a tragic romp, a hilarious disaster, and even an all-out farcebut one with very serious consequences.

Reviews

A bookworm seeks retribution in this novel about eternal friendship. . . . Taylor has woven a heartstrings-tugging story of change. . . . the authors well-researched work transports readers . . . to the insular world of advertising. . . . This intriguing tale successfully combines reprisal and renewal.
Kirkus Reviews

. . . a tender and quirky story rooted in Eleanor and Jons transformations. The unexpected turns in the plot will keep readers guessing as well.
Booklist

Reading an A.R. Taylor novel is like being shot out of a cannononly a hell of a lot more fun. Call Me When You're Deadis deliciously witty and smart, with the kind of fast-paced and completely entertaining plot that makes it impossible to stop turning the pages once the fuse is lit.
Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of MinglingandMingling with the Enemy

A.R. Taylor can do no wrong. To be clear: She loves wrong. She revels in wrong. She rights and writes multiple wrongs in her books. And sometimes its all right in the end. Though sometimes it isnt. Which seems to be why her latest novel perfectly lands in New York and the advertising world, a hotbed in several senses of wrongs. Lets all give thanks that she writes fiction and is not a theologian or an apologist. Here is another tour de force from the indomitable, hilarious, brilliant, and (slyly) compassionate A.R. Taylor.
Joseph Di Prisco, chair of the New Literary Project and author of The Good Family Fitzgeraldand Subway to California

Author Bio

A.R. Taylor is a playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the IPPY Book Awards 2015, was a USA Best Book Awards Finalist, and was named by Kirkus Reviews as one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014. Her second novel, Jenna Takes The Fall, received the 2021 Readers' Favorite Book Awards Bronze Medal in Fiction: Intrigue. She's been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goesthe Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud. In her past life, she was head writer on two Emmy-winning series for public television. She has performed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Tongue & Groove in Hollywood, and Lit Crawl L.A. 2016. Find her video blog, Trailing Edge: Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone, at www.lonecamel.com.