The Double Life is Twice as Good

This collection of essays, short stories, articles, and even a cartoon is bizarrely disparate: The topics range from prostitution to goth to tennis, but in Ames’s capable hands, the disparity works, whether he’s recounting being lusted after by two virgins or duking it out as an amateur boxer. When the double virgins don’t pan out, he writes, “I went from feeling like a valued, golden penis–bearer to an easily replaced and dismissed little eunuch.” Ames, of course, is neither easily dismissed nor replaced.