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The Underminer

Mike Albo
Chapters (21)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table of Contents
  5. Bright Young Things campus of Clarkwell College, graduation in the town of Clarksville, somewhere upstate, 1990
  6. Cool Days open mike night at Kafka-fe, after band "2 Much" plays, 1991
  7. New on the Scene utside in front of Club Hush, for a film screening party of Kill Fee, 1993 o
  8. Single in the City at a French bistro, 1995
  9. Hangover brunch, the morning after, 1995
  10. Natural Health a chance meeting at Jasper’s Yoga Studio, 1996
  11. The Fat Flush ’90s in the foyer of a friend’s renovated brownstone, 1997
  12. Art Stars at Bonwyck Gallery, 1998
  13. Inner Odyssey the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, 1999
  14. Life After Death facedown in the dirt of the desert, next morning, 1999
  15. Loyal Companions catching up at the dog run, 2000 catching up at the dog run, 2000
  16. In the Real World a run-in at the ShopShape magazine launch party sponsored by Senor Strawberry Liqueur, early 2001
  17. Wartime spotted at Kinko's, late 2001
  18. Office Job in the cafeteria of the Conde Nast building, 2003
  19. Settling a yard sale on an obscure block in the outer borough, 2003
  20. Starting Over in a remote village tavern on the farmlands of New Zealand, 2004
  21. Epilogue a gathering of friends

Cover Page

Seriously, everyone loves The Underminer.

"You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll wince with recognition . . . Richly detailed and pitch perfect. . . The authors adroitly skewer all manner of modern-day affectations—celebrity name-dropping and club hopping, the New York arts and literary scene, fad diets and exercise crazes."—Chicago Tribune

"A novel masquerading as a self-help book—or is it a self-help book masquerading as a novel?"—USA Today

"Pitch-perfect . . . The Underminer is a compressed comic classic of New York, a kind of anti-E. B. White fable . . . Nasty. But fun. And very funny. I started out dog-earing the pages of the galley I laughed most at, but then ended up dog-earing most of the book . . . I really want all New Yorkers, especially the Underminers among us, to read it."—New York Observer

"It's classified as fiction, but anyone who's lived it will know the novel is anything but imagined."—Washington Post

"I started laughing with the first sentence, didn't stop until the last sentence, and then, randomly, for the next week, the slightest reminder of one of the zillion funny lines in The Underminer would set me off again."—Malcolm Gladwell, author ofBlink and The Tipping Point

"Diabolical . . . it makes you chuckle, but it also makes you squirm."—Arizona Republic

"The underminer is an ego-skewering, passive-aggressive blowhard of indeterminate gender, surfing annoyingly along the breaking waves of pop and consumer culture—from dot-com to New Age, from hip-hop to a yurt in Afghanistan—always on top and armed with a put-down."—New York Times

"Hilarious and sick, The Underminer is one of those books that makes you insane with rage and laughter. I loved it more than I hate people like this."—Margaret Cho

"With the help of New York Times TV critic Heffernan, Albo successfully parlays his one-man stage show into both a roman a clef about '90s decadence and a self-help Get the Heck Out of This Relationship Now and Join the Witness Protection Program tome."—Entertainment Weekly

"The title character—a better-looking, more successful 'friend' who manages to make you feel like a colossal loser while simultaneously offering words of support-will be instantly recognizable to anyone who lives in L.A. or New York, or works in the entertainment industry . . . The duo seems to have put a name to the one dysfunctional Gen-X relationship not yet given its due in the DSM-III."—Publishers Weekly

"You will recognize the narrator of The Underminer: the person in your life who always does things before you, better than you, and far more profitably than you. The kind of person who manages to express that she cares about you in a way that makes you want to kill yourself.''—Chicago Sun-Times

"Scathingly funny . . . It's an era made for the Underminer."

—Philadelphia Inquirer