How sure-footed and observant Sloane Crosley is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny. If you needed a bib while reading I Was Told There’d Be Cake, you might consider diapers for How Did You Get This Number.
—David Sedaris

The hilarious New York Times bestselling literary essay collection from Sloane Crosley, the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake.

In I Was Told There’d Be Cake, readers met Sloane Crosley, a young Manhattan urbanite who aimed for the stars and hit the ceiling. Now she packs up her sensibility and takes us with her to Paris, to Portugal, even to Alaska (for an unsettling bear-infested collision between bridesmaid and nature), and back to New York City, a place of untold new layers and unexpected complications. With buoyant optimism, a fair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering, Crosley is determined to take on (if not create) the messiest dilemmas the world has to offer.

Book trailer for How Did You Get This Number.

Chicken dioramas created for How Did You Get This Number by artist Sloane Tanen:

Praise for How Did You Get This Number:

“Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showman­like…but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation.” The New York Times Book Review

“Crosley responds to everyday absurdities with self-deprecation and an arsenal of metaphors, applying insights like a salve….As she expounds on her various mishaps and anxieties, it all manages to seem like proof that even when she's lost, she knows what she's doing all along.” The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Crosley has been honing her craft since we’ve seen her last, and the hard work shows. Now, she has mastered the precision of novelistic scene-setting deployed by our greatest practitioners of the American sentimental essay, writers such as Gopnik, Sedaris and, yes, even Thurber.” The Denver Post

“In the battle for space on my family-room bookshelf, Sloane Crosley’s “How Did You Get This Number” just pushed David Sedaris to the second-floor stacks….Where “Cake” played strictly for laughs, Crosley finds more balance here – she never slips into parody, and she knows how to keep the mood buoyed, even in moments with pathos.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“What puts Crosley over is her preternatural ability to slip into her offbeat interior world—and cajole us into going there too.” Elle Magazine

“Crosley is engaging and energetic…She is a fountain of observations, apt metaphors, and escalating wit.” The Boston Globe

“An intimate anthropologist…Crosley returns wiser without losing her sharpness.” The Onion