USA Today

Don’t bother looking up “hookup” in the dictionary. The newest definition has nothing to do with washing machines or sound systems. Most twentysomethings know what it means. For the rest of us, there’s The Hookup Handbook: A Single Girl’s Guide to Living It Up (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $14.95). Spotlight, which focuses on “hip” non-fiction, also released last fall’s He’s Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo. It was a hit (1.9 million copies in print) and remains on USA Today’s Bestselling Books list (currently No. 26).

Hookup authors Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler define a hookup as “anything from making out to doing the nasty.” Adds Rozler: “Most people say it’s somewhere in the middle.”

Dating, as we know it, has gone the way of dinosaurs, say Lavinthal and Rozler, both 25.

Technology and lifestyle, they say, have changed the way men and women interact.

Rozler says she and Lavinthal “wanted to write a fun book about what’s going on” between the sexes. There are chapters on hookup hot spots, hookup-friendly bachelorette pads and the latest hookup lingo. (“Schick-blocked” means opting not to hook up because you haven’t shaved your legs in a week.)

No surprise, of course, that sex sells - even in bookstores. But the authors stress they are not advocating casual sex. “That’s not what this is about,” Lavinthal says. “You can be hooking up, you can be in a serious relationship; it doesn’t matter if it makes you happy.” Lavinthal and Rozler can’t imagine a time when women sat at home waiting for the phone to ring. cell phones have changed all that. As they write, “text-messaging is the new phone call ... IM is the new face-to-face conversation.” “If you go to a bar, you see girls and guys text-messaging

each other,” Lavinthal says. Adds Rozler: “The whole waiting-by-the-phone thing is eliminated, because you can take your phone with you.”

Do the authors practice what they preach?

Lavinthal says she’s into a “Back to the Future” hookup with her ex-boyfriend. Rozler says she’s single and hooks up, “but I’m not a completely wild and crazy person ... no more than anyone else.” “Or any less,” Lavinthal adds.