欲望都市(Sex and the City)简介：

"We're leading sensory saturated lives," announces jetsetting photographer and playboy Peter Beard in a roundtable discussion of menages a trois, setting the tone of opulent debasement that suffuses this collection of Bushnell's punchy, archly knowing and sharply observed sex columns from the New York Observer. Prowling the modish clubs, party circuit and weekend getaways of rich and trendy New York society (most of whose denizens are identified by pseudonyms), Bushnell offers a brash, radically unromantic perspective. She visits a sex club and dates a Bicycle Boy ("the literary romantic subspecies" whose patron saints are George Plimpton and Murray Kempton). But in most chapters she keeps to the sidelines, deploying instead her alter-ego Carrie (like the author, a blonde writer from Connecticut in her mid-30s), whose sweet if feckless romance with Mr. Big?a nondescript power player?serves as a foil for the hilarious, unsentimentalized misadventures of her peers. These include model-chasers like Barkley, 25, a painter with the face of a Botticelli angel whose parents pay for his SoHo junior loft, and Tom Peri, the "emotional Mayflower," who ferries newly dumped women to higher emotional ground and is then invariably dumped. The effect is that of an Armistead Maupin-like canvas tinged with a liberal smattering of Judith Krantz. Collected in one volume, Bushnell's characters grow generic, but in small doses these essays are brain candy that will appeal equally to urban romantics and anti-romantics.

“该书贴进现实……以相当高的文学赋勾勒出了曼哈顿忙碌的生活和都市人的必态。”
——乔纳森·亚德雷《华盛顿邮报·书评世界》
“一缕新鲜空气……其现实主义精神堪与汤姆·伍尔夫的《虚荣的篝火》相媲美。”
——《华尔街日报》
作者地她所熟悉的那个纸醉金迷的世界里似睡还醒、随而不从的观察者。
——《纽约时报》
令人爱不释手……一部诙谐而又贴进生活的杰作。
——ELLE
　　准备好了吗？那么，让我们开始一段情人节的故事吧。
　　她，一个英国女记者，女人味十足且不失聪慧，孤身一人来到纽约。没用多久，漂亮的女记者就钓上了一个货真价实的"钻石王老五"。

这就是风靡全球的电视剧《欲望都市》的原著。

原著比电视剧更接近于曼哈顿的生活，其主人公的结局与电视剧也迥然不同。在电视剧里，四个主人公的命运，无一不回归到传统的婚姻家庭：他们有的爱路荆棘但重归于好；有的惯于独处却养子待婆；有的性爱无度但终趋专一；有的极端朱剔却包容对方。但是，原著并非都是这般。原著有更多的主人公，好们以凯莉——一个专栏作家为主线面缓缓展开，因此，原著更像是一幅纽约上流社会的风俗画，其中相当数量的人物和地点都是真实的，内容也不例外。我们可以清楚地看到更多人物的结局：她们没有令照任何男人的意愿而生活，萨曼莎最终决定离开纽约，放弃她所熟知的一切，并且和泰勒·基德走在了一起；贝拉拒绝生养，还擢升总裁；布里格德抛弃了丈夫，纵情享乐；阿玛丽塔爬出了贫民窟，开起了自己的咨询公司，还把私生女送进了贵族学校；而凯莉，依旧独身。也许凯莉和彼格先生最终的分手，会让很多熟悉他们的人感到难过和遗憾，但……

这就是原法原味的曼哈顿，这就是彻骨寂寞的纽约。