Search results for: dolan

Another one of John Dolan’s long-forgotten poetry collections, Stuck Up is distinguished from People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes by having a semblance of a plot. Each of its poems are presented as part of the story of “a resentful, defiant, absurd figure sulking in Canada’s North Woods,” presumably Dolan himself. The book’s very title refers toContinue reading “Stuck Up by John Dolan”

It’s easy to forget that prior to his career as The Exile’s book critic and his writing as the War Nerd, John Dolan was a poet. Not a very popular one either; as he lamented in a NSFWCORP article last year, he never could “get anybody to read the nice, simple gory stories I told with linebreaks because theyContinue reading “People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes by John Dolan”

If John Dolan and I were to ever meet, I’m pretty sure that we would not get along. He would see me as an obnoxious reactionary jerk; I would see him as a sniveling, defeatist dweeb. Nonetheless, Dolan is probably the closest thing I have to a personal hero. John Dolan is best known forContinue reading “Pleasant Hell by John Dolan”

Welcome to the Divide… is a first for me: a book that is completely unreviewable. I can’t say it’s a good book, but I can’t say it’s bad, either. .S.P. Daley’s (that’s not a typo: his pen name has that extra period) debut novel is a dense digression on individuality, collectivism and dystopia, written in squid-ink prose andContinue reading “Welcome to the Divide… by .S.P. Daley”

This book is the intellectual equivalent of being shoved feet-first into a meat grinder. In Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker, Andy Nowicki’s first nonfiction title, he lays bare the chaos and conflict of his soul for all to jeer at. Nowicki’s numerous fiction works, from The Columbine Pilgrim’s psychological profile of spree shooters to Heart Killer’s erotic revenge story,Continue reading “Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker by Andy Nowicki”

Are you sick of overwrought metaphors, unnecessarily big words and mawkish moralizing dressed up in highfalutin language? You’re not alone. The American literary establishment has been in the grip of talentless hacks for at least the past three decades, with shysters like David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster and others allowed to pass offContinue reading “A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose by B.R. Myers”

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on August 2, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct. I’ve mentioned before that the defunct Moscow muckraking journal/gutter rag the eXile was one of my earliest intellectual influences. I’m still not sure whether I should be proud of that. I ran across theContinue reading “Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi”