Through the Self-Help Glass -- Very Darkly

Meet Ashton Robinson, a dashing playboy whose suave charm, worldly pretensions, and ecstatic seminars have made him one of the most successful motivational speakers in the country.

After an encounter with the synergistic effects of marijuana and expired cough syrup, Robinson renounces his life as a self-help icon and pronounces himself a spiritually enlightened master. Overnight he invents the world's newest religion, based on meditation, bungee-cord jumping, tantric sex, and The Gap. Has he stumbled upon one of the great truths of the universe? Or has the same outsized ego that fueled his success as a motivational speaker driven him over the edge?

With surgical wit and acuity, Trey Ellis has written a titillating and trenchant tale about the revivalist fervor of the American self-help industry. Right Here, Right Now is a corrosively funny and provocative exploration of the impulse to self-improvement -- one of the most salient features of American popular culture at the close of the twentieth century.

From his prep school days through Stanford University to his sudden starring career as a buppie Mr. Fixit on a cable TV series, Austin McMillan has only one thing on his mind -- women. In a diary chronicling his rollercoaster ride to maturity, he confides his adventures with the opposite sex as he tries to make out -- and make it in -- a predominantly white world.

Trey Ellis's uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne's latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy-two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City-the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.
This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," a groundbreaking essay by Ellis that appeared in the journal Callaloo.