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Murray Tepper would say that he is an ordinary New Yorker who is simply trying to read the newspaper in peace. But he reads while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, and his car always seems to be in a particularly desirable parking spot. Not surprisingly, he is regularly interrupted by drivers who want to know if he is going out. Tepper isn’t going out. Why not? His explanations tend to be rather the indisputable fact, for instance, that he has twenty minutes left on the meter. Tepper’s behavior sometimes irritates the people who want his spot. (“Is that where you live? Is that car rent-controlled?”) It also irritates the mayor—Frank Ducavelli, known in tabloid headlines as Il Duce—who sees Murray Tepper as a harbinger of what His Honor always calls “the forces of disorder.” But once New Yorkers become aware of Tepper, some of them begin to suspect that he knows something they don’t know. And an ever-increasing number of them are willing to line up for the opportunity to sit in his car with him and find out. Tepper Isn’t Going Out is a wise and witty story of an ordinary man who, perhaps innocently, changes the world around This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.
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A very fun book with a lot of humor and a dash of Kafka. I don't much care for books about New York but if you live in a city, parts of this book are universal (yes, I live in LA, and no, I have no valet to park my car).
"Sometimes, I'll pull up to their corner, on Madison, and there are four or five spots available at meters that don't need to be fed after seven. I just glide into one of the spots. I take my choice. I always say to my wife, 'Well, I've just had the high point of the evening. No matter what happens, the rest of it will be downhill.'"